Goblin Knot
by inkdaemon
Summary: The strings manipulating the Goblin King are tangling and knotting, making him wretched. To salve his unease, Jareth realises he must look Above and find Sarah- his unwitting puppeteer. Chapter 28: The Inattentive Teapot. :D
1. Concerning Chickens

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter One: Concerning Chickens.**

He was indeed a cleverly crafted marionette. With long smooth limbs and glassy eyes, he gave a very good impression of being life-like. Not even the strings that manipulated his movements could be seen. Not seen to the eye, but evident regardless. All puppets have this flaw. Even this one- the very best, their King.

It should be mentioned here that fae Goblin King Jareth was not without his own resources. He felt every restricting jerk of his puppeteer Aboveground, but gnashed his teeth and set to ignoring the unpleasantness with proper royal disdain. There were chicken catapults to admire, minion imps and trolls to crush delightfully underfoot. Each century that passed Underground had a particularly good year or two. For months on end he would be entertained by mortals trying to outwit the Labyrinth. Jareth's lips curled in memory. Yes, they talked a good game initially- but throw in a little attempted homicide and they got all huffy and didn't want to play anymore. It wasn't his fault they were so obnoxious about needing a certain volume of blood to stay alive. Just another one of humanity's glaring faults.

Flinching, Jareth moved to open the wooden shutters of his castle chamber. Evening smoke from the Goblin City drifted in and lurked by the bed-hangings. From the smell of it, several buildings and citizens were on fire. Again. Peasants while making very good kindling, were terribly odorous when burnt. A family of spriggans had once ruined an important state dinner when their rolling stench escaped the kitchen fires and permeated the dining hall. After the disastrous political fall-out that followed, Jareth now insisted all citizens, permanent residents and migratory workers received a thorough hosing down before use as barbeque briquettes. For this reason a goblin spotted on the street with a bucket of water would send others screaming in the opposite direction. Replace the bucket with a crossbow, and the offending party would be pressed upon to take tea (distilled bog water) and crumpets (free-range faeries, minced and toasted 'till crispy).

Leaning out the open window, Jareth considered the empty stone fireplace that ran along the chamber's north wall. The outside air was cool, but not brisk enough to warrant the hassle and deaths of several pedestrians milling about below. Retrieving a cloak from the back of a chair, he pulled it about his shoulders and idly wondered what season it was Aboveground. When mortals ran the Labyrinth, he could tell by their hideous floral-shirts and flip-flops summer reigned. In winter they wore ridiculous bobbled hats and so many layers of clothing, a bloated marshmallow would look quite slim in comparison. A loose cotton shirt, breeches, and waistcoat. Was it spring when she ran? Autumn?

Jareth sat on the edge of his vast bed, mildly surprised and largely disgusted. He thought he'd stamped out the worst of this sentimental rubbish after she left, millennia ago. It was foolish to moon after a girl who so casually shattered his universe when she refused to stay. Like shards of broken glass each little surfaced memory had to be dug out from beneath his skin. Jareth wound the folds of his dusky-grey cloak tighter against his arms and shot the hanging tapestries a poisonous look. Threads worked a scene from the Unseelie Court- inhabitants were strewn amongst the stalagmites of dank phosphorescent cavern. Some hideous and others fair. But every single one oozed malice. It had something to do with a flash of their eyes, ill-intention that could not be disguised even in cloth. _She_ had met his eyes and been properly afraid. For about thirty seconds. Despite his best efforts to be appropriately fearsome- she saw through the pantomime theatrics and recognised them for what they were. Smoke and mirrors.

Beyond the window came a muted scuffling of claws and stone. Several chickens rejecting their careers as projectile objects were currently forming an avian militia group, intent on wreaking havoc and laying the City to waste. They weren't entirely sure how this could be achieved, but all were agreed that defecating on the King's masonry was a good place to start. Jareth lay back on the bed with his long legs stretched out to the floor. He hadn't the energy to deal with splinter-cell poultry, even as an owl. Banshee shrieking and tearing a small creature apart with his talons was usually such jolly fun, too.

Frowning, he closed his eyes and kicked a pair of dark leather boots from his feet. _She_ had very different ideas about what constituted 'fun'. Cavorting with cranium-addled cretins. Oh yes, he watched them through the pane of her bedroom window- willing, demanding, _pleading_ that she speak his name. That she acknowledge his existence. All it would take were two little syllables, tripping from her rosy lips. But she would not. Did not. The girl who ran and won knew the power in a spoken name- it's ability to conjure and ensnare. She cringed as baleful eyes raked her back, but still would not be moved by pity. She left the Goblin King out in the cold. Let him eat mice and count the stars by himself. She had no more words to say to him.

"_You have no power over me."_ The jaw was stubborn. She was biting the inside of her cheek, making the left side of her face look pinched. The voice was strong and clear, piercing the castle's stagnant air. Yet Jareth still thought she might concede. Her pale hands shook- a barely discernable tremor snaking upwards into her shoulders, hunching them defensively. The conditions Jareth placed upon his voluntary enslavement were trifles. Compared to what she would be getting in return, she knew this. She had to… surely? Picking up her toddling brother, she simply turned her face away- quitting the Underground and it's King. That was when Jareth's world quite literally imploded. Shockwaves radiating out through the earth's crust sparked violent earthquakes Above and Underground.

Rampaging mutant lizards are not considered an acceptable disaster explanation Above, so they instead distributed some poppycock about tectonic plates colliding. Jareth sniffed. All the mutant lizards he had ever encountered were very philosophical about 'mass population relocation'- into their stomachs. It was a very clichéd 'circle of life' approach.

With each passing decade, Jareth could feel the strings about him coiling and knotting a little more tightly. Like a Labyrinth leviathan, they would not rest until his bones splintered. How many years until that happened?

The Underground equivalent of daylight crept into the chamber. What would become of him then? Opening his eyes to chickens raiding his wash-stand, Jareth came to a horrible realisation. He knew now what had to be done. Following his strings would lead back to the puppeteer. Back to Sarah Williams.

**a/n: Hope you enjoyed Chapter One: Concerning Chickens. I'd love to hear your thoughts in a review! The title, 'Goblin Knot' is my very sad attempt at punning the mythic 'Gordian Knot'- have a peruse on Wiki and you'll know what I mean. I'll also be attempting weekly updates if there's any keen readers. Cheers, guys!**


	2. In Which Jareth Encounters Problems

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Two: In Which Jareth Encounters Problems.**

Espionage requires cunning and tact. Very few goblins ever learn the arts of treading quietly and keen observation. They have as much subtlety as a brick being thrown through a window. But with a regime of constant repetition and monosyllabic words, some of the brighter ones could be taught. It took several hundred years, but Jareth succeeded in training the baby-snatchers to keep their traps shut when stealing human children.

Previously, their inane chattering would wake nurses, parents, and large guard-dogs with sharp teeth. Not surprisingly, they all objected rather forcefully to having their progeny pinched.

Now a smattering of goblins could move about Aboveground as the dead do- in unnoticed silence. They did this on the understanding that their glorious monarch would slowly remove their tongues with iron pliers in the event of non-compliance. Jareth collected several of the best snatchers in his throne room when he eventually emerged from his chamber later that day. Pillaging chickens had attempted to abscond with his wash-cloth and a bar of soap.

This obliged the Goblin King to spend most of his morning catching and flinging unrepentant fowl from the windows. Beating feathers from his embroidered jacket, he eyed his nervous subjects.

Typically, they weren't called before the King unless there was a problem with a child. Like a human infant with a new toy, Jareth loved and coddled them for a few hours until he grew bored and sent them away. Or much sooner when they threw-up from too much bouncing upon his knee. The goblins shuffling in front of the cold granite throne were surprised they couldn't see or smell any traces of child filth on the King. But they kept their mouths shut. Centuries of training in action.

"I need you to go Above and find a child," Jareth said. The goblins shared a sense of relief. Over their heads were thousands, millions of children to be found and taken. The littlest ones came conveniently gift-wrapped, decked in bows and ribbons while sleeping peacefully in their bassinettes. This would be easy.

"Not just any child," Jareth continued, watching the cogs turn in their peanut sized brains. "A girl, the one who escaped the Labyrinth." He would not use any repulsive words like won, bested, or champion while in the company of lessers. It rudely implied he was not entirely all-powerful. "I need you to find her," Jareth repeated, "not snatch her."

Were they not conditioned to fear the pliers, this last instruction would have sent a murmur rippling through the small group.

"The normal scrying methods are not working. When you find her, remove anything that may be hindering Sight. Iron, St. John's wort, the obvious. Yes, it will hurt. No, I don't care a jot. Questions?" Jareth ended brightly, knowing full-well the goblins could just as easily have had their mouths sewn shut. "Good. Leave now. If you hurry, you should be able to make the crossing by sunset. Do not be seen or heard," he emphasized darkly. "Displeasure is something I have an abundance of today. I can share." Bowing low, the goblin troop scraped backwards from the throne.

Crossing the fractures separating realms was difficult. It required a great deal of magick preparation to minimise physical damage. Human stories made it seem easy- a mountain would simply crack open, and vast goblin hordes rushed forth like runny egg-yolk. As always, reality is never that simple. Neglected rites were the leading cause of death by disintegration amongst crossers. Goblins do not leave behind beautiful corpses, so Jareth was somewhat understanding that the truth had been slightly warped.

Let the mortals keep their notion that all other-worldly beings are powerful and pretty. Gross assumption as it was, free publicity never hurt anyone- particularly when you were a fine example of self-righteous magnificence, as Jareth knew himself to be. He fingered the delicate stem of a wineglass perched on one of the throne's wide stone armrests. A fae lordling incapable of finding a mulish girl. If the Court found out, he'd banish himself from the shame.

Time curled in a spiral Underground. If a month or so passed Above, Jareth had spent decades trying to See Sarah. A glimpse would have sufficed- the smallest of shimmers. Just one he could hoard away and look at when his mind grew quiet. But she was tricksome, wily. She had known about the crystal baubles from the start and found a way to deflect them. Jareth's persistence wore thin as a steady stream of crystals retuned empty to the Underground.

_She's doing this from spite,_ Jareth thought. _Very well, a pox! Let her wallow in slimy misery. Curses! Retribution! Plagues of frogs!_ Realizing he could not illicit amphibians to rain from the sky, the Goblin King settled in to sulk for a few thousand years. He could not go Aboveground unless she implicitly asked for him. He could not watch her in the crystals. Now years later, when he finally had demeaned himself by using common scrying, he found Seeing impossible. Were Jareth not particularly vain about his hair, he would have pulled great hanks of it out in a fit of rage. Somehow she'd learnt about scrying too.

An unaware person could be spied upon using any reflective surface in their daily lives. These included, but were by no means limited to: mirrors, polished glass, smooth stone, and the occasional clean goldfish bowl. Making his head appear suddenly in a foul-watered aquarium with bad tempered fish was a mistake Jareth was unlikely to make again. But she knew he would try to See and had blinded him. By sending the quietest, swiftest of goblins to remove any obstructions, he would be able to look at her. Drink her image in slow, savored draughts.

Thirteen hours had been too cruel. Never mind the time limit had been a term of the Labyrinth- _his_ rule. He had offered endless days to someone who then had difficulty seeing a future beyond the next hour. The wineglass stood full at Jareth's side. He would find her naturally, but after that his certainty wavered. He hadn't the faintest idea of what he'd do afterwards. Send flowers or platinum-plated manacles? With petulant fingertips, he slid the glass to the edge of the throne's armrest.

He felt her presence Above too keenly. She made him dance about the Kingdom as a puppet possessed. When he found Sarah, could he make her cut the strings that bound him? More importantly, would he want her to?

The glass teetered on the edge of destruction. With an index finger, Jareth slowly and deliberately pushed it over, relishing the musical crash of breaking glass. Dark red wine fanned out in little rivulets before being swallowed up by cracks in the floor's flagstones.

**a/n: Presenting Chapter Two! Featuring dialogue! Whatever is the world coming to? My thanks to the lovelies who reviewed the first chapter and added G.K. to their alerts. It's encouraging so many people seem to find literary eccentricity normal. :D I hope you and others enjoy this chapter. I tried to address some of the mysteries that were pointed out in the last one (like relative time and pitiful attempts at metaphor). Let me know what you think! Cheers.**

**Edit (28/01/10): Arallion, I've fixed hoard/horde. Thanks for pointing it out! :3**


	3. The Plant of St John

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Three: The Plant of St. John.**

Four years after her descent Underground, Sarah Williams liked to think she was a little wiser. Her ego had been dealt a swift kick in the pants the instant she laid her brother Toby back in his cot following their return. If only for him, she'd be more careful. _Foolish, stupid girl!_ Blatant idiocy was never a flattering attribute- bravado even less so.

At nineteen years old, Sarah had said goodbye to her dingy local high school. The chewing-gum beneath the desks, air-conditioning with pure ornamental value, and the administration assistant that always called her Sally. While shopping around for a university degree that caught and held her attention, she remained in the family home. She had an amount of money saved working various low-paid retail jobs throughout the last years of high school. It would be worth eating into her savings to relax and take a few months of holidays from the world.

_A pity my brain can't take a holiday from me,_ Sarah thought grimly. _But where would it go anyway? I can't imagine any high-class hotel treating it nicely. Likely the staff would use it as an umbrella stand the moment it squelched and wobbled over the doormat._ Standing in the kitchen's dusky light, Sarah checked herself. That was quite enough nonsense for one evening. Her parents were spending the night playing cards with the neighbours. Sarah was invited, but opted to stay home and mind Toby.

He had outgrown the crying marathons that used to drive his sister mad. At five-and-a-half years old, he was plucky, intelligent, and wanted to participate in everything Sarah was doing. She smiled as he peered around a kitchen cabinet. She had such a short time left before he grew up and away from her. Another five years and he'd have his own friends, own opinions, and generally be too cool to hang around with a daggy older sister. She beamed down at him. But that was then.

"I want to water my plants," Toby said.

"Of course," Sarah replied. "They haven't had a drink today. They'll be thirsty." Together they took a small tin watering can from beneath the sink and filled it at the tap, Toby standing on a chair to run the water. Sarah played at being Chief Gardener's Assistant and let him help as much as he wanted to. Along the kitchen windowsill was a narrow terracotta box filled with what looked like straggly weeds. In many places, they were.

St. John's wort was the finance broker of the plant kingdom. It spread through grazing pasture with viral speed, sucking up the nutrients of decent grasses. Animals would not eat it, so it was often free to overrun entire fields. Sarah found it one day growing by the roadside- the bus had missed her stop and eventually deposited her some distance away from suburbia. She'd recognized it by the yellow flower topping a slim stem. Many of the books she used to read had pictures of them, speaking highly of their medicinal properties. What caught Sarah's interest was their repellent nature. The ability to turf out any particularly stick sprite, goblin, or fae from a human dwelling.

Her books said they did not like the flower especially. It reminded them too much of the Aboveground's sun- that giant ball of flaming gas that burnt and blinded. They preferred the company of things that grew Underground- thistles, carnivorous creepers, and mind-altering fruit trees. Carefully, Sarah uprooted a few plants and wrapped them in newspaper to take home. One pot-pant quickly became two, then five, then twelve. They jostled for space on windowsills and in doorways. Smaller seedlings lived in the laundry and bathroom sinks until they grew bigger- greedily catching water from dripping taps.

If Sarah's parents thought her new interest in horticulture strange, they didn't fuss. All they asked for was that no dirt be trodden into the carpet, and that Toby be supervised around any fertilizing chemicals. He was just at the age when taking swigs from mysterious, brightly coloured bottles seemed to be a terribly good idea. When full grown, Sarah attacked the wort with a pair of scissors. Stems, leaves, and flowers all went into a copper hidden behind the greenhouse.

The copper was one of Sarah's better finds last hard-rubbish day. It consisted of a large metal drum on stumpy legs. A heavy lid fitted snugly to the top, and near the base was a very basic tap. When the copper was almost full, Sarah added water and lit a fire beneath it. As a witch tending her cauldron, she would lift the lid and give the contents a stir every couple of hours. In the end a dark brown soup was left that could be drained and bottled into recycled jars.

It was nasty business. The wort liquid smelt rank- worse than a wet dog that had rolled in manure, eaten something that had been dead for ages, then decided to give it's owner a slobbering canine kiss. Wood-smoke clung to her hair and clothing- a raw scrubbing in the shower the only remedy. But it was worth the smell and hard labour. Mixed with lavender (great swathes of the stuff), the liquid soothed skin rashes and hives.

Last month Toby soberly informed her of a plant that 'bit people'- mostly favouring young boys. Looking up from a magazine, Sarah blinked. He had fallen into a patch of stinging nettles, goodness-knows-where. Barbed leaves stuck to his clothes and red weals flushed the skin of his hands and face. Tossing the magazine aside, Sarah marched the mournful explorer into the bathroom. When the bath was half-full, she helped Toby to strip down and bundled him in. Doused with lavender-wort, he had forgotten all about nettles and their taste for boy-flesh. An hour later and he was back outside, jumping in muddy puddles while dressed in clean pyjamas.

When her parents weren't at home, Sarah often fell to shielding her life for another day. Into a spray-bottle went the wort-liquid and iron filings. With scrupulous care, she visited every shiny surface and wiped it down with the concoction and a damp cloth. As the house wasn't crawling with Underground critters, it seemed safe to assume the books hadn't been lying. Finishing her rounds with a strong cup of tea, she'd spend the rest of the day in perfect contentment.

That _he_ wouldn't be able to See her also carried a welcome reassurance. Memories made her jumpy. At fifteen, her convictions had been much stronger than they were now. She did not yield. But if he were to ask again, quietly, would she still be as resolute? It was a pretty chestnut of a problem she could not crack. All she knew was that right now, she desperately wanted space and distance, _not_ to feel like a specimen in a zoo with someone tapping on the other side of the glass.

Dusk melted into night and a mopoke called from the hazel trees. Sarah pulled the kitchen blinds shut, turning away to ask Toby what he wanted for their dinner. She did not hear the startled mopoke break off it's song and fly away in a hurry. She did not see the air by the hazels bend and fray, tearing ever-so slightly. Nor the knobbly hands and feet that came out of the hole. She did not hear the softest of footfalls on the dew-soaked lawn. But then, she could be forgiven for that. No-one could. The snatchers had excellent training, after all.

**a/n: Chapter Three! Goblins will be on hand next chapter to ensure further madness, rest assured. I'm currently proofing the draft. Thank-you very much for reviewing Chapter Two- the feedback made me smile (particularly knowing Jareth's words could someday intimidate children- I expect he's an expert at making paltry threats sound serious). Please keep up the splendiferous efforts at reviewing! It's great so many people are sharing their thoughts. Cheers! **


	4. Tearing the Net

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Four: Tearing the Net.**

Stepping out from the fracture by the hazel trees, the snatchers were sorely tempted to leap straight back in again. Goblins are cowards- a celebrated quality amongst their kind. Any fool can act heroically and get themselves skewered on a jousting lance. Or eaten by a bear. Clever chaps avoided situations with a high probability of death. It's difficult to gloat about how wonderful you are when you've taken up residence of a wooden box six feet under.

They waited by the trees until cracks of yellow light from the windows grew dark. An hour passed to make sure the girl was sleeping soundly. Another hour when one of them realised they didn't know how long an hour was. The resulting scuffle collectively knocked out six teeth, broke nine toes, and may have ruptured a spleen- all silently. Jareth petting the iron pliers in a meaningful sort of way was something they all remembered.

In single file, they inched around forgotten toys and lawn gnomes, heading towards the house's rear steps. Pain broke over them in waves, the same feeling as being kindling in the Royal Kitchen Fire. The unpleasant sensation built rapidly- bubbling away beneath the skin. Primitive instinct screamed at them to turn tail and run. But they remained on the job, skin blistering and cracking soundlessly.

Iron was at work here. Beneath the tangy smell of metal was something less familiar, a dull reek similar to blue vein cheese. St. John's wort. It's essence stung the eyes spitefully- a very malicious kind of plant. But then by all accounts in the Underground, it's patron St. John had been a bit of prat too. The wooden door was the weakest point in the wall. It scorched less than the neighbouring kitchen window. Cringing, two snatchers were shoved bodily through the cat-flap by their fellows.

They landed in a small tiled laundry. Walking past the wash-trough and shelves crammed with detergents was enough to send the pair into a cold sweat. What house of horrors had they stumbled into? Best they do their duty quickly and leave as soon as possible. Moving from the laundry, they padded down the corridor and into the bathroom.

Breathing hurt. The entire room stank of wort and iron, burning their lungs with each tenuous gulp of air. His Majesty needed holes in this defence net to See. But where to put them? It was clear the girl made routine visits to every reflective surface. They smelt old, musty layers of hurt beneath the new. With care they scrambled onto the countertop, one carrying a tiny green-glass vial.

Its contents were worth far more than several black-market goblin kidneys. Oil from the primrose flower was rare Underground. Largely because it was made from another nasty Aboveground plant, and mostly because opened small fissures between realms. The cracks weren't big enough to pass through- a proper crossing was needed for that, but they were sufficient to peer into the other side, as an eye against a keyhole. Unstopping the vial, the snatcher climbed onto the shoulders of it's accomplice.

If a hole were to be torn at the very tippy-top of the mirror, it stood a good chanced of not being patched straight away. From the tapering thickness of layers it felt like the girl had leaned over the sink to rub down the mirror- not stand on the counter like a practical and hygienically-inept goblin. Pouring a small amount of precious oil on it's fingertips (it scalded worse than bath-water), the snatcher dabbed at a top corner, spreading it thinly so the cloudy smudges weren't as obvious. Finished, it kicked a heel into it's friend's collarbone to be let back down.

Lithely jumping from the counter they left the bathroom and slinked into the living room. At the far end were two glass-fronted bookcases that received the same treatment as the bathroom mirror, holes poked into corners where it was hoped they would not be discovered. In the kitchen they anointed the refrigerator door, resisting an urge to rummage through jars of pickles and stick slices of processed cheese to the ceiling.

The breathing sounds from one of the bedrooms suddenly changed. Centuries of stealing sleeping children had taught the snatchers what breathing patterns to listen for. Light ins-and-outs, and the child was dreaming. Slow and steady, they had sunk into a deep unconscious void. These sounds issuing from the other side of the house were short and broken- a nightmare. Cowardly impulse rose and overwhelmed the pair.

There was no telling if the child would wake suddenly to escape their dream. Better to quickly scarper and avoid detection. With smoking skin the snatchers stoppered and stowed the vial safely away. In the space of a feeble human heartbeat, they had bailed out of the cat-flap and rejoined the others on the lawn.

Waxing moonlight lit the way back to the hazels. On the way, two or three ceramic lawn gnomes were picked up and stashed as Aboveground souvenirs, to brandish gleefully in front of jealous relatives and work colleagues.

A cloud whispered past the moon and they were gone- the fluttering edges of the fracture sewing shut behind them.

**a/n: My, these chapters are fairly clipping along! I hope you all liked reading this one. Thank-you, everyone, for your lovely reviews, alerts, and favourites. Keep up the top-notch work at reviewing! They're a nice writing motivator (coupled with excess coffee). They're also quite humbling, coming from such a great talent pool here on ff dot net. **

**You'll also forgive me my little colloquialisms (as thoughtfully mentioned last chapter)- I often forget I'm writing for an international audience, so locale may have a habit of seeping through in terms of language and expression. But if you get the gist of my manic ramblings in the first place, then perhaps I'm not doing too poorly then.**

**Please share your thoughts in a review! Jareth shall be making an appearance in Chapter the Next- I'm drafting that one right now. :3 Cheerio, pip-pip!**


	5. In Which Jareth Asks Questions

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Five: In Which Jareth Asks An Awful Lot of Questions.**

It was the same horrific nightmare. Always the same. She's fall asleep in her bed only to wake somewhere else. She smelt damp soil all about her, but could not touch it. Her fingers scrambled for familiar purchase- clawing at empty air. That was usually when she felt a slow trickle of dirt fall across her face. The terror of the dream-state peaked, with a thought, _I've been buried alive_. Then the screaming started.

Sarah was extremely thankful Toby slept heavily. He wouldn't rationalize her fear as a silly dream (adults being boring, sedentary creatures- incapable of anything imaginative), but as something more serious. Perhaps ankle-chewing monsters under the bed, or a bogeyman perched on the ceiling fan. If he knew she often woke up in the middle of the night sweating, he'd squeeze her hand and build them a pillow fort to sleep in- his teddy bear Sir Lancelot guarding them both. But he slept on peacefully, rolling over beneath his quilt as Sarah slipped past the open door of his room.

She kept one hand against the wall, stumbling through darkness. It's presence was reassuring. Solid. Real. A cup of tea and a nibble of dark chocolate would get rid of the sour taste in her mouth and calm her nerves. Snapping on the kitchen lights, she rubbed her eyes against the electric glare and pulled a hair elastic from her wrist. Having long hair out of her eyes and off her face helped. She felt less flustered. Yawning, she shuffled past the fridge to fill the kettle at the sink. Once it was spluttering over the stove's gas-ring, she opened the pantry doors and began a hopeful search for chocolate.

...

The first time he had seen her in hundreds of thousands of years, and she was wearing bunny slippers. _Bunny slippers!_ Her flannelette-print pyjamas of black cats in various self-deprecating postures might be called good taste in comparison to those.

Jareth knew Sarah would be older when he looked through the hole in the fridge door. Time ran solidly as a cable-car Aboveground, in straight lines. But she still dressed like the child she was when he first met her. Why was that?

He expected her to be different, somehow. A truly fiendish puppet-master does not partake of tea and confectionary. But there she stood, leaning against the kitchen cabinets. Magnetic. Spiteful. Rumpled? Jareth sat straighter in his throne, squaring shoulders against the rigid back.

Now that he was paying real attention, he Saw she _was_ different. Shadows ringed her eyes. The fingers that grasped the sides of the tea-cup trembled, white at the knuckles. What was it that had made her fearful? If she had seen the snatchers… no, they weren't cause for alarm. The pliers were unrivalled as a workplace training tool. Even if they had failed and been spotted, it was unlikely Sarah would take on so. Underground the only thing that surprised her had been the puffy sleeves of her ball gown.

Jareth tilted his head, angling for a better view. What then? A dream, perhaps. She had a blurred-around-the-edges look about her, like someone who wasn't altogether sure what reality they were in. Her manner was alarming. It disrupted the self-serving orbit of the Goblin King's universe. Jareth passed a hand over his eyes, wishing that she would leave the kitchen- that he wouldn't feel compelled to watch her piecing herself together like this. It was unpleasant, unnatural, too human.

Yet he knew he would look again. His strings always pulled him in her direction. From a corner of the bookcase, he watched her leave the half-empty tea-cup on the bench and sink into the living room couch, switching on a nearby reading lamp. Since when was she afraid of the dark? Drawing up her legs, Sarah pulled a crocheted rug from the back of the couch and tucked it around herself, small beside the empty tracts of carpet.

Jareth drew angry nails across the throne's armrests with an ear-splitting screech. The girl was an idiot. One word and there would be no monsters, no unseen terror to grip her in the still hours of the night. The Underground afforded many an evening's entertainment for insomniacs. Human poets snared from various centuries enjoyed them immensely. Why shouldn't she? Because she was an imbecilic, stubborn, moronic excuse for a wretch dressed in _bunny slippers._

He rose and paced the throne room, vainly attempting to quell a manic fit of rage. It was not difficult to speak _one_ word. A tiny sound, lost in the white noise of television and motor-traffic, but one that would ring in his ears wherever he lay. A rooster had unfortunately chosen this moment to interrupt the Goblin King's brooding and invade his personal space. He was, however, the very first rooster to experience the sensation of flying at the wrathful toe of the Royal Boot.

...

The blanket was thick and heavy, keeping Sarah toasty-warm as the sweat dried on her skin. The last thing she wanted was to catch cold. Half-shutting her eyes, she hugged a cushion to her stomach and listened to the slow mechanism of the mantel's clock tick over. She didn't begrudge her parents a social life, just wished they were around a bit more when she really needed them. Not to talk to, but just knowing they were steadfastly asleep in the next room was comforting- a child's luxury rarely given a second thought.

But she was the adult now. It was her hands that stroked Toby's hair, her voice that uttered little soothing words when his dreams turned feral. Skirting the edges of a doze, Sarah remembered the tea-cup on the bench. She half-wished for someone else to dump out the cold dregs, making her a cup of warm milk and vanilla, like her mother used to when she was very small. For someone else to put the cup into her hands, making sure she drank it while sitting on the other end of the couch. For someone else to pull the rug up to her chin and switch the lamp off when she finally drifted into a tranquil sleep.

But there was no-one.

Not Aboveground…

**a/n: My, my… developments! :D Welcome back, lovely readers, new and old. Hope your Jareth-cravings have been somewhat sated. It's great so many people are taking an interest in G.K. Next chapter will hopefully be out around the same time next week, if not sooner. Now review, my pretties, review! (Cackling, Wicked Witch of the West-like.) Cheers.**


	6. The Rare Nesting Fae

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Six: The Rare Nesting Fae. **

Sarah woke the next morning with a stiff neck and a five-and-a-half year old at her elbow. The couch had lured her to sleep on it with it's inviting softness, only to spend the rest of the evening maliciously rearranging her spine.

"Toby," she said, as much to the cushion beneath her head as to her brother. "What do you want?"

"Breakfast," Toby chirped- all sunbeams and rainbows in this early morning hour. "And cartoons. Why are sleeping here?"

"I'm not anymore," Sarah groaned, half-rolling half-sliding off the edge of the couch until she reached the carpet in a rug-girl tangle. "Can't Mum make it for you?"

"She's not up yet." Sarah extracted herself from both the rug and floor and gingerly stood up, stepping into her favourite pair of bunny slippers.

"Of course not. Silly me," she muttered.

Passing through the kitchen she picked up last night's tea-cup and poured the contents down the drain. She'd had a peculiar thought before sleep overcame her. Milk and vanilla, that was certain. But something, someone else too. Sarah quickly let herself be distracted by making oaten porridge over the stove for Toby. She stuffed the lingering thought in a dark recess of her mind and concentrated on slicing banana and drizzling honey into Toby's favourite bowl.

"Why aren't you eating?" he asked suspiciously, wolfing down porridge in a hurry to watch Saturday morning television. "Dad said-"

"Everyone needs to eat breakfast, yes," Sarah interrupted. "And don't talk with your mouth full or it will try to escape. I'm not spending my weekend hunting down fugitive cereal." Taking a plunger-jug from a nearby cabinet, she leaned across the bench and inspected the remains of Toby's bowl. "I'll eat after I've had coffee. You can watch TV now if you've had enough."

With a whoop of delight, Toby scraped back his chair beside the dining table and bolted into the living room. Sarah shook her head, tipping dark-roasted coffee beans into a small electric grinder. Her brother hadn't mastered spelling his own name, but he knew how to operate every remote and electronic gizmo in the house- usually better than his sister or parents. What would _he_ make of her now, using mundane machinery to get her daily quota of caffeine? Before Sarah could wrangle the thought back into her subconscious, it drew a little smile from her lips. What would he, indeed?

………

_The noise! Oberon forbid, the noise!_ A sackful of cats run through a wood-chipper could not compare to the hideous din she was extracting from that tortured contraption. Jareth clapped his hands to his ears and fervently prayed he wasn't bleeding from them. He had forgotten noise could seep through the holes between realms, too.

Ever since he could See Sarah again, Jareth decided to set up camp in his throne room. At first, he told himself, it would just be one quick look, a fleeting glance to remind himself what she looked like, how she moved. But once he began watching, he could not tear himself away. He was able to move about for the necessities of basic function, but in all other aspects became a zombie- sans mouldering corpse-flesh and a penchant for nibbling on human brains.

All but the most pressing business of the Kingdom was turned away. Meetings with foreign dignitaries were postponed, scheduled Labyrinth inspections were cancelled. Mortals may have invaded the Underground and built a fast-food establishment over the Bog of Eternal Stench for all the Goblin King knew or cared. Trappings from the bed were carried down from his chamber by servants and arranged into a cosy throne-nest for the ensconced ruler. The shallow pit in the centre of the room was cleared of goblin toys and a fire built up. To spare the King's nose (and lives of the peasantry), expensive yew logs were used, the sharp smell as they burnt filling the room and helping Jareth to See clearly.

Periodically, food and drink would appear at his side. Yet so preoccupied was he that Jareth took little notice of it. When he did, it was only because his body threatened to mutiny without sustenance, and he could not taste it. The servants did small chores in the throne room, otherwise leaving the King to stew awhile in his own juices. They kept the wilder goblin parties away from the main castle quarters and inducted new runners into the Labyrinth.

No-one could appear as magnificent to humans as Jareth. Or intimidating. The runners did not take goblin threats of failure seriously, coming from creatures shorter than their shins. The ridicule and sheer cheek became so bad, the butler, _sous_ chef, and boot gremlin were forced to work together for the sake of preserving the Kingdom's reputation. Slathering Glamour magick about haphazardly, they created a Jareth replicae- a kind of King by proxy.

Providing it did not speak, the substitute did a fair impersonation of the original. It's height (it was at least two heads taller) and appearance (it looked as though it's long nose had been mashed and reshaped oddly, like putty) duly menaced wayward humans and put them in their proper place.

Yet they soon gave up trying to teach it to imitate Jareth's dulcet voice. It had the unfortunate habit of speaking utter gibberish, in a very high pitch, with the odd word in Gaelic or Finnish thrown in. Words that are very impolite, even in those strange and peculiar Aboveground countries.

The real Jareth was becoming very… eccentric. He could not wholly focus on living within two realms simultaneously. This sadly made the daily edicts rather insensible for his subjects. A command may start, "Throw all hat-wearers into the Bog of-" only to end, "_milk?! _Who would ruin a perfectly good cup of tea by befouling it with milk?" The goblins were fairly sure Jareth had not created a viscous Bog of Milk, but didn't like to ask from politeness (and knowing they could be cursed into something small and scaly given the right provocation).

Long days melded into weeks and Jareth continued to nest in his throne. There came an evening when a low-ranking spriteling had the supreme honour of decanting a fresh glass of red wine for His Majesty. The butler was otherwise engaged- attempting to coax the replicae down from a tree in the garden where it was making very rude hand gestures.

"You," Jareth said, making the startled creature cower. A softly spoken King was more dangerous than his most violent of tempers multiplied by three.

"Go through the City and into the Labyrinth. Bring me the Dream Spinner. _Now._"

**a/n: Chapter Six! Next chapter the pace will pick-up, with Jareth devising a cunning plan(s). :D Yes, I shamefully pinched Ms. Jones' chapter-naming style (Howl & Castle in the Air are great books!). But I think she'd forgive me (or at the very least, not notice at all). **

**Thank-you all very much for your reviews, favourites and alerts last chapter. Let's see if you can outdo yourselves again! Sharing feedback is like drinking that fifth cup of coffee you _know_ you really shouldn't be having. The manic, gleeful buzz is there, minus obvious muscle twitches that attract dubious glances. Share the fun! Cheers! :3**


	7. The Dream Spinner

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Seven: The Dream Spinner.**

The spriteling chosen to fetch out the Dream Spinner from the Labyrinth was not envied. Castle-dwellers led a sheltered life, and rarely strayed beyond the City boundaries. So it was the messenger hummed a little funeral dirge to itself as the first higgledy-piggledy houses of the City rounded into view. It didn't dare go against an order from the King, just held a feeble hope that whatever certain death that followed, it would pounce quickly and painlessly.

Provisions needed to be purchased before traipsing through the Labyrinth's bowels. From an enterprising chicken cooperative, the spriteling managed to trade its left shoe for a golden ball of thread. Tied to a sturdy outcrop of rock at the beginning of the maze, the thread could be played out to great distances then followed back while winding to return.

Nobody knew to this day how the Greek mortal Theseus got his grubby mitts on a ball of goblin-made thread. Blame came from all directions when the Minotaur lodged a series of formal complaints to Jareth, citing his job was difficult enough as it was (constantly being harassed by humans with hero-complexes, trying to run him through with swords), and he'd appreciate it if the King's subjects would lay off in providing assistance to said humans, thank-you very much.

The thread was bright and strong, glinting in the murky light of the City. Glances slid from it to the poor doomed servant, then quickly away again. The others very much doubted the thread would be of any real help, trapped in the lonely wilds outside the City gates. But it gave a small comfort and sent the unfortunate one about its task quietly and meekly. That was enough for now. Trying to recall its innate soft footstep, the spriteling slunk past the mechanoid gate-guard and found a secure anchor to hold its lifeline. Fifteen knots and a bow-tie later, it turned and faced the dusty, pitch maw of the Labyrinth.

………

Air rattled in her desiccated lungs. When the first sentient creatures crawled out the earth's dim forgotten caverns, she was there- notched in their heads. To spin a dream is difficult- the strands of ideas are as insubstantial as smoke. Yet she persisted and eventually perfected.

The first dreams were crude and ugly things, much like the beings who dreamt them. No fanciful imagery or double meanings. Only the bones of necessity scraped raw. How can I keep this animal pelt from falling off me? How can I snare more food? What would happen if I poked this sleeping sabre-tooth tiger with a stick? Things that already existed within their world were unraveled and re-spun to create new possibilities.

She did not think much of goblin dreams. Food, wealth and power. There were variations on the themes, but no discernable differences. They had broken off from the other realms, cloistering themselves Underground. In doing so, they starved the Spinner of new and interesting strands she might coax into their dreams. Until now.

Whatever the reason, cracks and holes began to appear Above and Below. Whispers of suggestion seeped down from the fledgling human world. A finite lifespan seemed to provoke an irrational number of dreams amongst mortals. She had never seen so many strands in such lush, iridescent colours before. They wanted solutions and improvements for every invention. They wanted to experience every emotion with violent intensity. Like a soft lump of lead, they wanted to take the things of their dreams and solidly beat them out into real life. In their most secret of hearts, they wanted something entirely of their own making before they died.

Deep Underground, the Spinner found soft wisps of colour that had drifted down from Above, lying unnoticed beneath thorn thickets and rusted portcullises. The goblins could not see them, or else they'd immediately covet and horde. She walked the Labyrinth in several planes of reality, picking up and dusting off the precious few strands as she found them. As much as she would have liked to, she could not keep them for her own. The gifting nature of her being forbid it. Instead she cast about; searching for frayed greyish strands she might mend with colour.

A thin, pathetic little strand, no thicker than darning cotton, trailed through the castle gardens. It shrank when it first spotted her, but was not quick enough to dodge the clutching fingers. Watching the strand wriggling as a worm before the hook, the Spinner took a length of flashing colour and wove the two together seamlessly. Released, the repaired strand slipped away through the gardens, up a castle wall, through a shuttered window… Back to Jareth.

No-one was beyond the Dream Spinner's reach. She added diluted colour to the strand's weave at first, elements that would blend into the grey without raising too much suspicion. Lust and hate tied in nicely with Jareth's wont for theatrics. His brief meeting with the human child, little Sarah Williams, provided interesting material to rip apart and reshape.

Over the many years that followed, she slowly worked in stronger, brighter lengths of colour. A midnight blue sense of absence, the glittering emerald of jealousy. The dark ebony of misery and the gentle orange glow of a keening human heart. The strand steadily grew thicker, driving the Goblin King from what little sleep he already had. When he fell from exhaustion, he woke tired and irritable, fit to raze the City to the ground if he heard the slightest, jarring noise.

Although she had searched every square inch of the Underground, the Spinner had yet to find the most vivid, fragile colour- crimson, blood red. She doubted it could survive the crossing between realms; it was broken up so easily. Maybe, against all odds, it could be cultivated amongst the cold, unfeeling stones of the Labyrinth.

She spied a glimmer of gold through the dead, spiny trees. Not a dream strand- it wasn't visible in other realities. She stood completely still and listened to the spriteling as it negotiated the overgrown path.

Perhaps she would find the blood red strand sooner than expected.

**a/n: Chapter Seven! Sorry for the delay, life decided to stomp (Gozilla-like) all over my writing time. Hope you all enjoyed this one. Thank-you again for all of your splendid reviews. I love reading through all your comments and feedback! Please let me know what you think again! :D Cheers. **

**Edit (28/01/10): Yes, I've finally gotten around to fixing up my it/it's. Forgive the hideousness of it all and I hope everyone's eyeballs weren't too severely scorched. Thanks for pointing it out! :3**

**Arallion: I can see how 'shirked' may be confusing and have since humanely dispatched it. Thank-you very much for pointing it out! :D**


	8. In Which Plans Are Laid

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Eight: In Which Plans Are Laid.**

It was difficult to avoid stepping on the twigs and dry leaves that carpeted the thinning path. The spriteling did its very best to be quiet, but could not seem to help hearing loud snaps and crunches beneath its feet.

It was still so very young, barely five hundred years old, and without the learned cunning of weathered snatchers. The ball of thread grew smaller with each step away from the City gates. Trees grew close together- tearing up the ground with heavy, twisted roots and carving the sky with brittle branches. No Underground creatures lived in this decayed part of the Labyrinth. Not anymore.

Finally, the gold thread came to a knotted end. At a loss as to what must happen next, the spriteling held on fast, rather wishing it was back at the castle, listening to tales of fearless, radiant goblin ancestors from the older servants (the ones the others avoided on the premise they were senile crackpots).

Something unpleasantly squirmy beneath its liver told it there was a presence watching it behind the trees- piercing through the dead trunks and flaking bark. The spriteling could feel parts of its mind being teased out into the open and examined all over- a process that made it horrified and vaguely embarrassed in equal measures. This must be the place. This must be her.

"E-excuse me," it said to the empty air in a terrified squeak. "Err…Your Spinning-ness… marm… His Royal Majesty of the Underground, K-King Jareth, requests you pay him an immediate audience… umm… please? I-If it's not too much of a bother. I mean, that's t-to say, if you're busy spinning a dream shirt or something, I'm sure he won't mind if you came to call next week, or next year, or-" the babble broke off and it's eyes glossed over, seeing a waking dream in which every path was lined with gold.

………

She was essential to his plan. With the Dream Spinner's ageless skills, he would _force_ Sarah to say the word she had been biting back for years. He watched her closely in her home- lips mouthing the syllables without a decibel of sound escaping from them. A frustratingly coy vixen- even if she wasn't entirely aware of what she was doing.

Jareth pressed cold fingers against the back of his neck, feeling the warm patch of skin beneath his shirt collar and long, tangled blonde hair. His blood felt as though it were boiling. What would it be like to shadow her dreams as she had done to his? To make her spend every moment thinking of what lay beneath her feet- the life she had crumpled up and thrown away when she left?

The Goblin King didn't lie to himself. Beneath the rogue element of misguided romanticism, he knew he wanted a dash of spiteful revenge- burning her through the lens of a magnifying glass, just to watch her slowly smolder. The more he thought about it, the more he came to like the idea of cold satisfaction. She had earned it.

In a far corner of the throne room, light began to quiver and darken, as dying embers doused in water. There was no sound- no other sign, but Jareth knew she was there, listening. With great effort, he shut out the Sight and stood, shedding blankets as he rose from the throne-nest.

"You came," he said, feeling ridiculous for stating the obvious. Not so much a voice but dry, dusty words drifted across and settled in the back of his head.

_You called._ Jareth fingered the hem of his shirt, clarifying in his mind how the conversation would play out, so he wouldn't appear stupid, or weak, or young. The Dream Spinner was older that all life in the collective realms. No pressure.

"You've kept me waiting," he said. Good. Very good. Show control.

_No consequence,_ the dust-words spelled. _What of time to immortals?_ Jareth blinked. His pre-prepared, witty responses were rapidly falling apart.

"Well then," he continued, a little louder than necessary, "down to business. I need you to perform a delicate task. It involves this-"

_Girl, Sarah Williams._

"I was going to say insignificant insect, but that works too." The corner of darkness rippled- in anger or amusement, he couldn't tell.

_I knew your words,_ read the dust, _and I know your intentions now. What makes you think she will not suspect your involvement in her dreams? _Jareth stopped fidgeting and considered this. It was time for a goblin specialty- a smidgen of well-placed fawning.

"Because you are the height of excellence," he sighed. "You can spin the thought and make it seem entirely her own- unless your talents are not as they once were." Silence from the darkness. "Are they?" Jareth pressed.

_Naturally,_ the dust swirled thickly. _I will do this thing that you ask of me fae, but at your cost._

No three words had ever sounded as final as those. _At your cost. _Jareth shrugged away the heavy implication and nodded slightly.

"Then I place my sanity in your capable hands," he said simply.

**a/n: Chapter Eight! Jareth's cunning plan thus evolves. I doubt the Spinner is entirely of my own devising- likely I borrowed snippets from myth, like V.W. said. Isn't it curious what things you unknowingly pick up by osmosis? Infectious diseases aside. :D Thanks again for your encouraging reviews! Please share what you make of this chapter. Cheers! **

**Edit (28/01/10): Yes, I've finally gotten around to fixing up my it/it's and general spelling. Forgive the hideousness of it all and I hope everyone's eyeballs weren't too severely scorched. Thanks for pointing it out! :3**


	9. Which Contains Coffee and Kittens

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Nine: Which Contains Coffee and Kittens.**

At first, Sarah thought she was having a caffeine-induced hallucination. One too many espresso shots had sent her jittering (quite happily) over the edge of normality. With a rare evening to herself, she had spread her vast collection of university handbooks out over the living room floor. Time again to start researching undergraduate courses. She picked up the nearest glossy publication (for a campus with smiling, presumably sober students on the cover), and began flipping through it idly, sipping bitter black coffee as she read.

She had just trawled through the course synopsis for Biological Science (_'Hey kids! Enjoy cutting up dead things into little pieces? Enrol today!')_, when she felt a yawn creeping up the back of her throat. Once it escaped, it's friends wanted out too. The mug of coffee felt rather miffed as Sarah dozed off amongst the sea of magazines. It liked to pride itself on a job well done- keeping the drinker awake with only minor facial twitches. Maybe Sarah's circulatory system was now just liquid caffeine punctuated by a few odd blood cells. An extra drop or two of either wouldn't make much difference to conscious equilibrium. One thing was certain- the forgotten coffee would never hear the end of it's failure from that smarmy box of ancient decaf in the back of the pantry.

_Sarah_, said a voice. _His_ voice. She curled her fingers around the open pages of the course guide, crushing them. The word rushed to fill every hollow of her brain, then melted away just as quickly. Her dream-self fought surprise, mild hysteria, then eventually concluded her brain was having a perverted joke- payback for all her recent java abuse. She was just about to open a dream-box filled with blue-eyed, marmalade kittens, when she heard it. The rising, cracking scream of a screech owl.

………

_How diligently she scrubs away at the stain! _thought Jareth smugly. _Quite the domestic_. An ill-flung arm had sent the cold mug of coffee flying, brownish-black soaking into the spotless carpet pile as Sarah scrabbled to wake up. It took her some long minutes of staring to figure out why her mug was empty and why there was a spiral vortex of mess in the exact centre of the floor. Realisation sent her running for a bucket and carpet cleaner.

Half a bottle of greenish-goo later, and she seemed to think she had gotten the worst of it out. Well, she stopped cleaning at any rate. She peeled a pair of latex dish gloves from her hands and sat on her heels beyond the disaster zone. Surveying the damage. Trying to forget what she had just heard.

Jareth tut-tutted from his rearranged throne-nest. Humans had very peculiar ways of rationalizing and coping with the inexplicable. Sarah's solution seemed to be a blank middle-distance gaze. If she wasn't absently tracing a coffee stain on the skin of an inner wrist, he would have said she looked like an oversized, porcelain doll. The ones kept by old ladies who smelt strongly of liniment, dressing them in frilly skirts and lacy blouses. Jareth quickly gave himself a mental cuff. That was a dangerous line of thought best not followed. Stick to retribution. Retribution dressed in unprovocative, oversized hessian sacks.

The plan was simple- providing the Dream Spinner kept to it's sketchy outline. Tinker with Sarah's pretty little head. First it would be sounds, carefully selected to creep into the subconscious and set it on edge. Then images. The Spinner had a veritable portfolio of Jareth-stock to choose from. He vainly hoped she'd pick ones that were appropriately regal and devastatingly handsome. Sarah's memories of the masked ball should be stilted towards those. Jareth felt a nerve in his eye twitch. What if the Spinner decided to make him play the fool? Dress him in a showgirl's flamingo-pink boa, resplendent astride a tame ostrich? Were that the case, he'd route her from the Labyrinth and wring her smoky, insubstantial neck.

Sarah clumsily got to her feet, wincing as she heard her knee-caps pop. From the hole torn in the top of the mirror, Jareth looked down as she entered the bathroom and ran warm water into the plugged basin. Picking up a nail brush and a bar of soap, she set to scouring her wrist.

It was simply a matter of time before Sarah fell to dousing the household in offensive iron and wort again. What if she were to say _the _word, and he was unable to appear gallantly by her bedside- all because he was preoccupied with hacking up his disintegrated lungs in the next room? A minor problem. Better to tackle it as it happened.

For now, she just had to say it. As she drained the water and towelled her hands dry, he detected that familiar look of unreasonable stubbornness. She bit the inside of her cheek and frowned at her equally disgruntled reflection in the mirror. _She really looks quite pretty when peevish_, Jareth thought. _How about when she's miserable? Flushed pink and speechless? Or one of those horribly wet and howling things, dribbling from the eyes and nose? _It was an interesting question, and posed many entertaining answers.

The Goblin King stretched languidly, moving to throw another log on the fire.

Entertaining answers he would assuredly delight in discovering.

**a/n: Hello, all! Hope you liked Chapter Nine? You can tell I've had coffee rather on the brain lately- seeping in syrup-esque, like some glorious, monstrous, coffee-cake creature. I'm trying to get G.K. back to some sort of plot now- it strayed a little with Spinner origins. More JxS goodness to come! Please share your thoughts! **

**I'll also be posting story update-status on my profile now. This means I will feebly attempt to keep my sorry butt on a timely schedule. Cheers! :D**


	10. Sarah Has Unpleasant Revelations

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Ten: In Which Sarah Has Several Unpleasant Revelations.**

Forsaking the glossy brochures scattered across the living room floor, Sarah shed her coffee-stained clothes and pulled on her flannelette pyjamas. They were warm and slightly stiff- smelling strongly of sweet laundry detergent and sunshine. She hadn't remembered washing them. Perhaps her mother had, on one of those rare occasions when she felt like she should be taking better care of her children.

Emptying her pockets of clumped tissues, Sarah chafed her cold hands together and sought out the digital thermostat in the dining room. No-one rebuked her for cranking the central heating up to near-tropical temperatures. No-one was home. With a sigh she locked the front door, switched on the veranda lights for her returning family, and settled in her bedroom to soak in the growing warmth.

Huddled beneath her quilt, her hands held a book she wasn't interested in reading. She already knew it backwards and upside down. The book that had put her in this delightful, wretched mess in the first place. _Labyrinth._ Sarah found it tonight hiding amongst her carved pine bookshelves, falsely reeking of meek innocence. For all its terrible wrongs, Sarah could not hate it completely. There was a time, not many years ago, when it had been her solitary friend. It indulged her silly little delusions and put-up with being run over rough-shod in school bags and crammed into pockets. It forgave her when she briefly flirted with Victorian romantic literature, silk bustles and (apparently useless) aristocracy, tossed aside for familiar dark woods, dark characters, and dark deeds.

The red linen bindings were worn and soft. She felt the loose spine rub against the fraying, stitched pages with each flex of her fingertips. It was trying very hard to be comforting, she knew that. Not cutesy like a plush toy or bumbling adorable like a little brother, but reassuring in its own fashion. It reminded her of murky light, the rustling of dry leaves across stone, and the impossible, fantastic castle gardens beyond the Goblin City. It gently reproached her for discarding its characters, those few she fantasised of meeting and befriending.

How many times had she batted her eyelashes when _he_ strutted across the page? That silly enamoured smile would always catch her face- crinkling the corners of her mouth and eyes pleasantly. Yet when he sauntered into the sharp focus of reality- itching for her attention, all but _begging_ for her affection, her beloved apparition became unstuck. This version of Jareth was ill-tempered. Crueller. Unbending. It was as if all of his flaws had been extracted, distilled, and magnified. If it weren't for his agreeable looks, Sarah would have called him ugly.

Stretching out beneath the quilt as the heater warmed her room, Sarah traced a publisher's embossed insignia on the cover of _Labyrinth._ If someone had told _him _what she was like before they met, would he too have been disappointed? What if he had been fed stories of her charm, beauty, and grace- only to find her severely lacking in all three? Sarah placed a cool hand between her burning cheek and the pillow. _It's not my fault I've already been stamped as something I'm not,_ she thought angrily. _Who decided I should flounce about after an egotistical, self-proclaimed Goblin King?_

Tucked beside her knee she felt the book's solid weight. A voice in the back of her head- her own voice, sounding stupidly apologetic told her the answer. She had decided this years ago. Braiding her long dark hair with ribbons, she read. Tearing the skirts of her summer dress as she climbed trees, she read. She had pored over each and every page of _Labyrinth_, so much the faded fabric of her dress may have been paper and the dark tendrils of her hair ink, bleeding words together until they were an indecipherable mess.

She had wanted so much to _be_ there. To see the kind of shadow he cast. To hear him laugh. When the impossible sent him careening meteor-like towards her, she was suddenly afraid. Afraid of being overwhelmed and burnt-up, leaving nothing but a crater and scattered cinders. With frustration, she pummelled the pillow, flipped it over, and buried her face in its cool side.

Everything had gone wrong. She had deviated from the plot and now lay in unfamiliar territory. She was supposed to forget about him once the thirteenth hour had expired. He was supposed to try harder in keeping her Underground. They were supposed to have very different storybook endings.

………

The smell returned. It made Sarah think her nice clean pyjamas had been dragged through a mud-puddle, the way they plastered themselves to her clammy skin. Her limbs felt heavy, divorcing all other feelings from the rest of her body. With a sense of impending finality, she waited for the dislodged dirt to fall across her face so she could realise she had been given over to the attentions of coffin beetles.

A hand touched her face. Her own was lying wooden and useless by her side.

_Sarah,_ a voice murmured. _Pretty Sarah, silly Sarah, what are you doing here all by yourself?_ Sarah caught the brief flash of a silver-grey frock-coat in the widening gloom.

_If I knew, I wouldn't be here,_ she thought sullenly.

_Where would you rather be?_ the voice asked. _Somewhere different? _It paused. _Somewhere fun? _

From a corner of the nothingness that surrounded her, Sarah heard faint tinny strains of a harpsichord, repeating the same three bars of music over and over. She saw a young couple dancing in the distance, giddy in a whirl of silks and ribbons, and long glossy hair. They didn't seem to notice her watching their steps. The were encased within their own shimmering bubble of forever.

_Doesn't she look beautiful?_ _Doesn't she look happy? _the voice invited slyly. Sarah agreed. The lady _did_ look happy, albeit slightly oblivious. She let herself be spun and dipped by her partner with fluid movements- apparently careless that he might drop her at any moment. She seemed confident he would never let her fall or spin too far out of reach.

_Why don't you say it? _A smooth fingertip ran along her eyebrow, stopping at the temple. _Don't you want to drown in raptures? Nothing can touch them, you know- over there. Not dark nor light nor time. Not even the things that slink about unnoticed in the wildest woods of the Underground. _Sarah heard the soft trickle of dirt but could not feel it on her face. There was nothing but that smooth, cold fingertip above her eye.

_Say it,_ the voice muttered. _SAY IT, _the voice growled.

"Jareth," Sarah said. The name fell from her mouth and fled, quickly swallowed by the looping chords of an invisible harpsichord.

**a/n: Chapter Ten! Late, yes, but earlier than my delayed publish date. :D Don't we all love a cheap trade-off? Thank-you all for your splendid reviews last chapter. **

**Goth Angel UK: thanks for that punctuation reminder. I'll go back and fix the earlier chapters when I get a chance. 'It's' and 'its' have been enemies of mine for years. Luckily I found my dusty editing books and have now beat that particular rule into short-term memory. Huzzah! **

**Thanks again to everyone leaving such great comments and reviews! (The literary comparisons and random trivia are delightfully entertaining.) **

**It'd be fun to hear your thoughts again for this chapter (new and old readers alike). Have a good weekend guys- cheers!**


	11. Concerning Contractual Obligations

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Eleven: Concerning Contractual Obligations.**

"Jareth, Sarah said. The couple stopped whirling and turned to face her, empty hollows where their eyes should be. She watched as spider-webbing cracks ran up their clothes and across their faces, wincing as a noise like several thousand wine glass pyramids shattering into splinters erupted all about her. The blackness fell away, in a sheet of cascading sound.

Sarah woke to find herself lying facedown in the backyard's lawn. This was a little peculiar, because she wasn't in the habit of taking a casual kip in the damp grass of an evening.

_I'm imagining this,_ Sarah thought firmly. _That's all this is._ She inhaled deeply and sighed. There was a warm, alive smell beneath her cheek, the way a garden smells after a golden afternoon of perfect sunlight. _This is probably the dog's fur I'm drooling all over,_ she thought, _-serves him right for sneaking into my bed again._ Stretching her legs, her toes stubbed something hard. Not her carved bed's foot-board as she was expecting, but something else. Sarah groaned. It felt suspiciously round and plasticy, the perfect shape for the head of a lawn sprinkler.

"Why?" she muttered to the grass. "Why me?"

"It might be because you're a delectable, easy target. It might be retribution for things you haven't yet done. However, I would have to say it's most likely because of your hideous taste in slippers." Sarah's spine whipped over and up as a lash, bringing her face level to that of the voice's crouching owner.

"Hello," Jareth said pleasantly.

"You!" Sarah accused.

"Me," Jarath smiled.

"How _dare _you! Get out!" Sarah felt the rising pitch of her voice scrape against the back of her throat. She was unable to place it with either fear of anger, and this succeeded in making her more agitated.

"We're already outside," Jareth said amiably.

"I don't care!" Why don't you leave me- wait, how did I get here?"

Jareth stood and brushed imaginary dust from the front of his jacket. "I retrieved you. By the way, _I'm _the one who should be receiving a groveling apology on bended knee. Your poxy fortifications _hurt._" He pulled at the collar of his jacket to reveal fading red blisters puckering his skin. "I could have you lynched for that you know. My neck is much more valuable than yours." Sarah tore up a fistful of nearby grass and threw it with force in Jareth's direction. Blades fluttered through the air harmlessly to land on the tops of his boots. Peering down at them, Jareth quietly laughed- Sarah scowled and looked away.

"You really are quite tetchy when you first wake up, aren't you?" he said. For some unknown reason, this idea seemed to amuse him even more. His lips drew back and teeth shone blue in the moonlight.

"You shouldn't be here. You can't be." The flat tone of her words interrupted Jareth's private joke. He was expecting more venom from the irrational little spitfire seated on the ground before him. Bristling, he stepped a pace towards her.

"Why not?" he demanded. "There's hardly a group of elderly sewing circle ladies peering over the fence at me. It's quite safe."

"Don't twist my words, you know what I mean." Still not looking at him, Sarah drew up her legs and laid her pounding forehead against her knees. "You can't be here," she said again, voice muffled by the flannel of her pajama pants. Jareth watched her curling into herself and balked at a disgusting and ill-conceived notion to touch her hair.

"I'm not here by choice," he said, stepping away and throwing the barb at her. "You called me and I came. To not glean that one must by as dim as a dustbin, really." He glanced at the tangled mess of her hair and wondered what her face looked like beneath it.

………

Things were not going to plan. As soon as she had spoken his name, Jareth felt every nerve in his entire being electrify. This was it. This was the moment. Oberon forbid, what was he supposed to do? He so wanted to be near her, to see her slim hands tugging at the strings that made him talk and step like a madman. But another part of him entirely was still in favor of dragging her Underground and throwing her in the Bog of Eternal Stench. Or leaving her to molder in a nice dank pit for a few thousand years. Whatever opportunity came first. He agonized over the vindictive alternatives, eventually setting his cap at trying the inexplicable and unfamiliar: gallantry.

Like every good faery-tale prince, he would appear at the bedside of the beleaguered princess. He would lightly kiss her cold lips, her eyelids would flicker open, and she declare she loved him and had been waiting for him. Jareth was still rehearsing what he'd say if Sarah fell into a dazed swoon when he made the crossing between realms and picked his way through the rustling hazel trees. He was halfway across the lawn when his eyes began to sting. Half that distance again, and his body felt like it was being stuck all over with thumb tacks. Picking up his dragging feet, Jareth ran blindly towards the back door and grabbed at the searing latch.

Stumbling into the laundry, he crashed into the shelves against the far wall and sent washing powder and fabric softener spilling across the floor. Sneezing and coughing, he groped for the wall that would lead him out into the hallway. Blistering pain made his breath come short and his knees buckle dangerously.

_Gallantry be damned,_ Jareth thought, gasping as he staggered past the familiar door of Toby's empty bedroom. _She'll be more than lucky if I make it to her bedside alive. Where in blazes did she learn such nasty little tricks? It's as though she doesn't want me here at all! _Pausing at Sarah's closed door, he frowned, hand hovering above the door knob. _Maybe she didn't mean to say it. Maybe it was just an accident_, a small voice murmured. _You may be covered all over in filthy mortal cleaning products, but you can still leave with your dignity intact- what little remains. You were stupid to come. As stupid as her. What now of the great Goblin King? _Jareth moved his hand away from the door. _Still, _the voice continued, _wasn't it rather the point to make her say it? To put one over the silly child, this calculated moment that took hundreds of years of wretched waiting to enact? She might have really meant it, you know. Deep down where the subconscious is incapable of lying. But you'll never know if you continue to stand here and imagine voices spouting psychology, now will you? _

Shaking his head, Jareth took hold of the door knob and silently entered the room. There was a Sarah-sized lump on the bed beneath a quilt patterned with twining leaves and flowers. It moved up and down slowly and steadily. Jareth thanked Oberon she had slipped into heavy, dreamless sleep before he had bungled his way inside the house.

Scrubbing his smarting eyes with a jacket sleeve, he stealthily moved to the head of the bed and peeled back the quilt's edge. Sarah slept on her side, on hand beneath the pillow and another against a tatty old book with frayed bindings. Her hair was longer than he thought it would be- twisting around her shoulders and down her back like the clinging roots of some great Aboveground tree. In the green glow of a nearby clock-radio, he watched with distracted interest as her lips parted and breathing deepened. A look cross between royal smugness and a grimace of un-abating pain stretched Jareth's face rather oddly. He would not be able to linger quietly for much longer. Not when it felt like his brain was melting and slowly trickling out of his ears.

Jareth was left with little choice. He must at all costs appear calm and collected. Attractive was thankfully already a given. But the former could not be achieved in this sadist house of torture. Jareth eyed Sarah's sleeping form. Without the use of magick weakened by iron and wort, it _might_ be possible to carry her outside the feeble mortal way. She did not appear to be particularly heavy, tucked into a convenient sleeping bundle like that. Perhaps the weight of a sack of potatoes (not that Jareth had ever lifted a finger towards menial labor in his life), or a small flock of stout chickens. Flipping the rest of the quilt down to the bed's foot-board, his resolve increased. _Yes,_ he thought crisply, _too easy._

Sliding and arm beneath her shoulders and knees, he drew her across the mattress towards his bent chest and began to stand upright. Only to drop her in surprise a split second later. To be fair, Sarah didn't have far to fall. Indeed, she seemed scarcely aware she had been airborne at all, save for an incoherent mumble or two. Jareth glared down at the girl. Even when unconscious, it felt like she was mocking him, taunting him with the presumed weight of fifteen adult blue whales. How very tricksy of her. Jareth rolled up the sleeves of his jacket and bent again. But he was cleverer.

By sheer stubbornness, Jareth managed to carry Sarah out of the house. He almost dropped her again. Twice. A nasty slip on some spilt fabric softener very nearly sent both of them crashing through a laundry window. By the time Jareth reached the hazel trees, he had formed a large number of unflattering conspiracy theories regarding Aboveground body mass and gravity. Without ceremony, he dumped Sarah in the grass and began preening with a will. He had just cleaned his jacket of washing powder when he heard Sarah stir and mutter something to the lawn.

………

"I'm sorry, I know that," she said, still trying to curl into an even smaller ball. Jareth flinched away from her. 'Sorry' was a black profanity in the Underground. Worse than insinuating someone's mother has dubious out-of-hours interests. Like stamp collecting. "Just go and we'll pretend this never happened, okay?"

Jareth stood still. "I can't," he lied. "You know the rules of invoking me. You called and now you must give me something in exchange. It's a contractual obligation."

"Give you something?" Sarah murmured. "Like what?"

Jareth paused. "I'll let you know," he said.

There came a soft noise of shaking pinion feathers and he was gone- leaving Sarah alone in the moonlit yard.

**a/n: Chapter Eleven, my lovelies! Sorry for the massive delay, but you wouldn't believe the anti-writing nasties that have beset me lately (one of which include the sudden frying of my laptop's hard-drive). Never mind. With a notebook, pen, and borrowed computer, G.K. will prevail! I tried to make this chapter a little longer to compensate. Hope you all enjoyed reading it, and as always, I'm very keen to know what you're thinking! More JxS to come! :D**

**Cheers.**


	12. Delicacies of Squirrels and Shortbread

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twelve: The Delicacies of Squirrels and Shortbread.**

He swallowed the dead mouse whole, tasting its fear, fur, and hot salty blood. It was one of many, falling victim to Jareth's need to kill things and binge eat. He had not retreated far- just enough so his tawny plumage was hidden against the dappled trunk of a silver birch tree beyond the hazels. On the off-chance she might turn around and see him perched there. But she didn't look. She didn't move at all.

For the longest of times, Jareth was left wondering if he'd somehow managed to mangle her legs by dropping her on the lawn. Then suddenly she stirred. A frond of bracken, she uncurled, stood, and walked inside the house. The door shut behind her without the lock's bolt rattling across. Too late for locks. Too late for anything mildly rational.

Jareth left deep gouges in the birch as he fell from the branch and silently swept across the woodland floor. It was an untimely evening for the resident mice, most of whom thought Jareth was some sort of terrible flying cat before they were swallowed up by his sharp, snapping beak.

A full belly made for a fuzzy brain- precisely what Jareth wanted. Although a steady dram of goblin brew or stolen mortal rum would have done a better job, Jareth felt sufficiently vague to sneakily sidle up against his problems. Slapping them directly with a gauntlet would make him a chicken in owl's feathers.

In the crown of a yew tree, Jareth began to pick over the night's events. Sarah was somehow defective. Her mannerisms were all wrong. Underground, if something broke (dentures, chairs, skulls, etc.), the common practice was to fling it out into the street and forget all about it. Jareth did not think Sarah would particularly appreciate being flung about anywhere- outside or in. Perhaps if her new-found agreeableness persisted? Jareth removed a stray down-feather from his leg with a mixture of alarm and glee. Imagination rocketed forward, leaving his body behind as a distant speck.

_Sarah smiled sunnily- turning back to the porcelain cups on the garden table._

"_Tea, dearest? Your favourite," she said. Jareth sat on one of the delicate wicker chairs and stared._

"_Where did you find a frilly pink apron?" he asked. "__**Here? **__Underground?"_

"_Never mind that," Sarah said, "you mentioned you wanted tea?" Jareth considered the situation for three seconds flat and smiled too._

"_Why, I think I shall."_

"_Good. It's getting cold. Biscuit?" Sarah chirped, offering a plate piled high with shortbread. Just as Jareth leant forward to sample said biscuits, Sarah snatched the plate away. With a happy expression that looked as though it had been pasted on, she broke several shortbreads into crumbs over his head. Jareth steepled his fingers and mused. A domesticated Sarah he could deal with. Squirrels throwing twigs and interrupting his imaginary cup of tea he could not. _With a predatory scream, he collected his senses and set about making a dent in the local population.

A small mammal rebellion appropriately quelled, Jareth again crept beside his problem, balking at the gamey taste left in his mouth. What to ask of Sarah? What to extract from her, inch by inch? The showman within him trembled at the possibilities. All the obvious ones ran to red-curtain dramatic. Some involved her little brother, but were scratched when he remembered the child was now too big to bounce upon knees or alternatively stuffed into an empty bird cage.

Some required Sarah to wear exotic clothing or weep bitter tears of remorse for all the wrongs she had maliciously bestowed upon him. Jareth gave a great, hacking cough. The kind animals make to discard the un-digestible and un-identifiable. He had spent too many years on the fringes of lunacy. What of that to Sarah? She probably thought less about him than the time it took to brush her teeth every morning.

Lurching forward, Jareth shook feathers from his body and stood uneasily, gripping the yew's crown for support. What abstract an owl cannot completely grasp- a fae can (even one regretting indulging in so many snacks).

Time. Sarah Williams had time. Limited, distracted, and inhibited, yes. But it was hers and he wanted it. She could hand it over pleasantly as part of the cleverly fabricated contract- or, as his goblin upbringing dictated, he'd quite simply filch it.

Jareth's eyes glittered in the darkness.

She hadn't the means to turn him away.

Not now.

………

Sarah waited on the lawn for something to happen. Any minute now, someone would jump out from behind an unlikely tree and declare she had been bamboozled for the express amusement of a national television audience, but, not to worry old girl, here's an oversized novelty cheque for you to enjoy because you were such a good sport about the whole beastly business.

She waited.

No one came.

At some point her legs decided to carry her body into the house. Her arms and hands clearly did not trust her brain to make decisions regarding fine motor skills. They opened the back door for her legs, and softly closed it behind them. Once in the kitchen, they firmly rejected the brain's instructions to wring hands, nervously finger the silverware, or throw arms in the air and wave them about erratically like the garden variety madman.

Instead, they told her brain to stop acting like a drama queen and sit quietly in the corner for a bit. They (quite sensibly) took themselves off to arrange a soothing pot of chamomile tea.

Sarah sat down and regarded the steaming cup. By the time it cooled, she felt brave enough to conduct a little experiment.

_Jareth's back,_ she thought. Outright denial.

_Jareth's back? _Disbelief.

_Jareth's back. _Resentment.

_Jareth's back…_ Rising anger.

_Jareth's back… _Scorching temper. _And he stole me from my bed?!_

**a/n: Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead! My poor laptop still is though, until it can be gloriously resurrected in the manner of Frankenstein (with much cackling to be had by all). I'm also groveling-apologetic for keeping you all waiting for this chapter. Lately I've been indentured to work six days a week until I decide I don't like money and take myself away to live in a cave in the mountains. Admittedly, this would make the posting of G.K. by carrier pigeon a rather interesting experience.**

**I hope you liked reading this new chapter! Please share your thoughts as always. I'll read them by lantern-light in my cave.**

**Providing I remember to pack a book of matches.**

**Cheers! :D**


	13. Spoons and Stratagems

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Thirteen: In Which We Learn of Spoons and Stratagems**

"The sheer, bloody _cheek_!" Following a night spent vacillating between disbelief and boiling rage, Sarah was working herself into a fine frosty temper. She had almost perfected her indignant mutter- to a point where her reflection shirked away when it heard her voice.

"The nerve… what right?" She knew what her mother would say: complete sentences, my love. Use your words. Manic reactions may come after if you still feel the need to- not before.

Sarah allowed herself the pleasure of throwing a spoon against the refrigerator, happily noting the violent warp in its metal stem. Back sliding against the kitchen cabinets, she sat cross-legged on the cold tiles and concentrated on breathing mindlessly. Yet, when trying so hard to think of nothing, a something is bound to slither in. It swiftly teased apart all her nicely arranged verbs and nouns, leaving behind the clumsy and ill-defined fragments of before.

Leaning her head back and closing her eyes, Sarah let her mind wander and pounce upon wayward shards of thought.

_Jareth is an idiot._

_Jareth is an idiotic stalker._

_Jareth is an idiotic stalker who takes inappropriate liberties regarding unsuspecting victims._

Sarah picked up the fallen spoon by her side and studied her warping face in its metal hollow.

_Jareth is an idiotic, liberal stalker who smells rather nice, truth be told. Like sandalwood… and pine needles… and the soft notes of allspice. _

Scowling, Sarah threw the spoon at the toaster with all the malevolence she could muster. The force of impact snapped it in two and left a satisfying scratch on the innocent appliance. Sarah stood and brushed off the seat of her pyjamas. Jareth and his assorted smelliness could go hang, for all she cared. With steely resolve, she pulled a hair-elastic from her wrist and stalked into the bathroom.

There was much to do, and little time to do it in.

………

"Delicious? No. Useful? Yes!" Jareth laughed at the squirrels' expense and cracked another hazelnut between his teeth. Traipsing about the woods behind Sarah's house, he had whiled away the grey, pre-dawn hours by deciding how best to inform Sarah of the tithe he had chosen for her. Angry chattering some distance off told him he had interrupted a squirrel organizing its larder in the hollow of a tree, quite close by.

With a smirk he played a game of hot-cold with the creature, dipping a hand into the well-stocked cache of nuts just as the squirrel began to scream hysterics. Jareth walked on with his treasure, pocketing some and easily cracking others. He left behind a meandering trail of broken shells and the odd bitter kernel.

Yawning, he presently rubbed the back of his neck and shoulders. Jareth had not been in the Above's sunlight for many hundreds of years. The mere suggestion of it made his muscles tired and brain sluggish. Slowing his ramble to a halt, Jareth inspected a stunted yew who was clearly struggling to grow upwards in the deep green shade of its companions. Defying natural law, its trunk and branches dipped and arched across the ground, interweaving under Jareth's steady eye. Quickly, it formed the forest equivalent of a nomad's tent made from hides. The misshapen yew was smug in its small victory, glad it could serve where the others could not.

Jareth ducked beneath the new lintel and set about preparing for a prolonged nap. Linking hands behind his head, he listened as the first song-thrush of the morning ran scales. Thereafter he fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.

………

Smoke billowed from the garden. Thick, grey and acrid. To the casual observer, it may have seemed that the greenhouse had freakishly self-combusted in this spate of cool weather. Or else the blow-in beatniks from down the road were vandalizing property and distributing nonsensical pamphlets. Again.

Yet it was Sarah happily contributing to the neighbourhood's air-pollution (and she kept her conspiracy theories and political leanings to herself). Sarah, armed to the teeth and taking no prisoners. Still dressed in her pyjamas, she had slowed down long enough to tie her hair back, pull on a warm jumper, shoes and gloves before heading outside to give her stands of St. John's wort the absolute thrashing of their short lives.

She crammed armfuls into the copper and built a roaring fire beneath it. Burning sparks against her skin only served to make her more brutally industrious at her task. No burns, plant or fae were going to throw her mildly normal life out of order. Especially since some weeks ago, she had just convinced herself she _had_ a mildly normal life. Discounting an Underground King's sociopathic meddling of course. Or the fact that now she was outside in the cold air, forming stratagems in her pyjamas, when any other normal, un-harassed young woman would be waking up to an unhurried breakfast over the morning paper.

Sarah weighted the copper's ill-fitting lid with a brick and venomously stoked the fire. Any other normal young woman didn't have to deal with other-worldly royalty giving themselves airs in their backyards without the slightest provocation. Coughing, Sarah moved backwards as the breeze picked up and blew smoke into her face.

If Jareth had the slightest notion of wheedling something from her, contractual obligation or no, he would be sorely mistaken for trying. Peeling gloves from her hands, Sarah rubbed sleep from her eyes and grimaced.

Salt. She needed salt to emphasize the 'sore' in sorely.

**a/n: Chapter Thirteen, on Friday 13****th****! Ha! (Though I should point out here it will probably be the 12****th**** when most of you read this and I haven't a clue why this thirteen pattern deserves an almighty 'Ha!'. I take my petty victories where I can. :D**

**Thank-you all for your lovely reviews last chapter. Rest assured I spent some hours thinking I was better than raspberry jam after reading them. Only to realize I had completely forgotten how to spell the word 'spoon'. Even now, it took me two cracks to write that. Never mess with jam. Humiliation will be swift and exact.**

**Please share your thoughts! I neither confirm or deny the existence of voodoo magic, zombie-ghost writing or premeditated plot. :D**

**Cheerio, pip-pip! **


	14. Stars and Salt

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Fourteen : In Which We Decant Stars and Discover Salt.**

Jareth found soft shafts of starlight striking his hands and face as he slowly came to wake beneath his tent of yew. Flexing fingers above his head, he idly observed silver light twisting about knuckles and an upturned palm before disappearing in the darker fabric of his shirt cuff.

When was the last time he had breathed in the Above's whispering stars on a moonless night? With effort, Jareth moved from the tree and drew himself upright. The clear sky burnt and shimmered as he watched it. Endlessly tearing itself apart. Endlessly reforming. There was nothing like this Underground. Glow-worms and fireflies are admittedly charming to look at, but they were so terribly _finite._ Jareth was given the companionable feeling that if he were to return to this very spot in a thousand years, he would still recognize the majority of blazing lights. As he recognized Sarah would invariably concede. She must. He would accept nothing less. No alternatives.

Jareth removed his heavy jacket and folded it neatly over an arm- better allowing the strange marvel of cold, still air to envelop his skin. Sarah must not be sleeping within her dim, musty peasant's hovel. Not on a night like this. Jareth turned back towards the direction of her house. His boots made no sound stepping through the deep drifts of leaf litter.

It was time she surrendered the first second, the first minute, the first hour. Jareth bent aside hazel branches with a spare hand and peered at the cracks of yellow light escaping from curtained windows. It was time to dig the vixen from her den.

………

Sarah sat on the edge of her bed, hungry, tired, and nervous. Late in the day she had swapped her pyjama bottoms for jeans and cleaned up any evidence of her activities before her family returned for dinner. She picked at the meal her father made (miscellaneous vegetable combination attempt number twenty-five over rice- or lentils- it difficult to tell), skirting probing questions from her parents if she was feeling quite alright? In the end, she feigned a sudden migraine headache and left Toby to the vegetable-eating tyrannies of their mother. One day he would be able to fake an illness convincingly too.

In her room, Sarah locked the door. Crossing to her dressing table she opened its drawer and took out a small water pistol and a large plastic canister of table salt. The water pistol was one of Toby's, found lying in a flowerbed forgotten since last summer. She cleaned it thoroughly of mud and grit before filling the barrel with a fresh batch of potent iron and wort mix. Seeing it lying ready on the table gave her courage. A real gun with real bullets would have been of no use whatsoever.

She had no desire to kill Jareth (though she doubted mortal weapons could even come close to grazing his skin). She simply wanted to ensure he kept his distance if- no, _when_ he eventually turned up again. Unscrewing the salt canister's lid, she laid thick white lines against the bottom of the door and window. She retreated to the edge of her bed and poured handfuls of salt into her jean's pockets for good measure. She refused to let Jareth unbalance her again. Rationally, she knew she felt a fraction of responsibility for bringing him here.

She should not have said his name. She knew better. _He _knew better. He should have stayed away. But it was a moment of reciprocal, sugar-spun weakness. She supposed he couldn't completely help himself, not really. This instinct to balance pesky mortal action with reaction was built into his system over many thousands of years. He used humanity and they used him. The exchange was not a one-way affair.

Long ago, when he had taken her brother, he had asked to be paid for services rendered. With obedience, fear, and affection. She denied him remuneration and the system fell apart. Sarah clutched the salt canister to her heart, feeling the treacherous organ's strings thrum with raw energy. She did not know what Jareth would ask of her now. Surely it had to be something substantial for him to decide she had recourse to clearing her debt.

Sarah jumped as the outside wind blew bare twigs of a tree ever-so-softly against her window pane. She glanced at the small analogue clock sitting forward of her bookcase's motley debris. Until this point it had been ticking sedately onwards. As the long hand struck midnight's hour, Sarah heard the metal gears shudder and stop. With a grating squeal, the clock began to tick again. Only backwards. Sarah bundled her knees against her chest, squirming as the back of her neck and scalp prickled uncomfortably.

Perhaps, despite everything, he wouldn't come. Perhaps she should settle beneath her quilt and wake up in the morning feeling completely silly for an unjustified sense of paranoia. Sarah ran fidgeting fingers through her hair, loosely weaving it into a single braid down her back. The tree tapped against her window again and Sarah felt the bottom of her stomach fall away. Trees do not know how to knock out the precise beats of 'shave-and-a-haircut'.

She stayed were she was. After an interval, the tapping came again. Louder. With the third insistent repetition, she somehow managed to put numb feet on the floor and stuff the water pistol into a back pocket. Never had she seen a curtained window look so menacing before. Like ripping off a sticking plaster, she tore aside the curtain in one rapid action. Better to get it over with quickly. Then she could go back to the fanciful, unlikely realities of Aboveground life.

Jareth, somehow sitting on a spindly branch without breaking it, withdrew his hand away from the window pane.

"Good evening," he said mildly, muffled behind the thin glass. Sarah stared. Jareth stared back. "Open this window please. I have something to tell you." Sarah gripped the salt canister more tightly and took a step backwards.

"No," she began haltingly, gathering forcefulness as she remembered the searing anger that had led her to fortify her room. She was not an object to be picked up, handled an unceremoniously thrown about with nary a 'by-your-leave'. "No," she repeated, "whatever it is _fae_; you can stay outside and tell me from there."

"Sarah," Jareth chided, "_human. _The 'please' was a politeness. I don't give those out willy-nilly as you well know. Open this window."

"No."

"_Now_."

"You have no-" Sarah started.

"-idea how insufferable it is to be denied common _flipping_ courtesy whilst rearranging the universe to sit on a cold spiky tree limb outside the room of an equally cold and spiky girl," Jareth interrupted, any trace of the smug smile he once wore now gone. "You will open this window immediately or I will. With such noise it will wake your family, the neighbours, and the small wriggly things that live on the moon."

Jareth swayed on the branch, bracing a foot against the wide window sill and taking hold of the sash in both hands.

"One," he said.

Sarah glared at him, cheek pinched.

"Two," he threatened, rattling the glass in its frame.

Sarah kicked at a ripple in the carpet trying to block out the sounds.

"Three…" Cracks began to splinter across the pane.

"Wait!" Sarah hissed, stepping back to the window and shying away as she shoved the sash upwards. The cool night air drifted in past the Goblin King and accosted her with its pleasant, traitorous, brain-washing scents.

"Are you happy now?" she spat, looking for a measure of separation. "What a way to behave. Does the Court know you still have toddler tantrums?"

"Ecstatic," said Jareth ungraciously. "Thank-you. At least _my _outbursts result in something useful. All yours seem to do is destroy subpar cutlery."

Sarah frowned, her tone suspicious. "How did you-"

Jareth pointed to his head. "King," he reminded. "Aren't you going to invite me in?"

Sarah tossed her braid over a shoulder and jutted out her chin. "You won't find me very welcoming," she flatly stated.

"A minor detail," Jareth placed another foot on the sill, "which I'm sure rigorous re-education will reverse." He moved fluidly to crouch on the sill, hands above his head still holding onto the window sash for balance.

Yet he could not enter the room. Making a noise between his teeth, he looked down and saw the thick line of white crystals.

"Salt," he growled, eyes snapping up. "Sarah, you really are too unkind to me." She snorted loudly, incredulous he was trying to play the card of victim.

"I told you I wasn't in the welcoming mood."

Jareth's expression blackened. "Regardless, you will hear the terms of the contract. I have chosen an appropriate price for you."

Sarah suppressed the urge to pick up the backwards-running clock and make a dent in Jareth's backwards-running head. She had not experienced being talked down to like a chimpanzee before. It was not an enjoyable sensation.

"You will pay me," Jareth continued, "with time." He raised a finger, silencing Sarah as she opened her mouth to speak. "I know the querulous nature of your logic. Time in this instance does not mean infinity. You are going to repay me in installments. Starting with an hour. Starting now. Outside."

Sarah backed away until the back of her legs hit the bed.

"I'm not… you can't make me…" she trailed off as the still air whipped into a brisk wind, plucking at their clothes and hair. Sarah met Jareth's eyes as they flashed in sudden triumph. The unnatural wind had blown a break in the salt line.

"I think you are coming outside," Jareth said quietly, "and what a halcyon evening it shall be."

**a/n: Chapter Fourteen was brought to you by: chocolate, coffee (excess quantities thereof), and frequent inappropriate workplace giggling (the latter bringing my age and mental stability into question, ending in a supervised, coffee-machine ban).**

**In a moment of caffeine sobriety, I'd like to thank you all again for your marvelous reviews. They really do encourage me to write- I take pleasure in knowing what other people like, and what they don't. They're great motivators!**

**And Vic Wit and FM, I do not take the slightest offence for your enjoyment of my notes- wait, that's not right… I mean, **_**how DARE you find humor in deadpan? Cads! **_**;p I thank you both, and all the charming regulars for giving such nice reviews. They brighten up my day when others are beating me away from the coffee-machine with a broom.**

**Now to enjoy a brisk bout with totally unrelated insomnia.**

**Please share your thoughts everyone! Cheers. :D**


	15. Leaves and Lunatics

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Fifteen: Regarding Leaves and Lunatics.**

It happened too fast for Sarah to see. One moment she was standing in her room flooded with rising panic, and in the next came a cold, firm grip around her wrist. Before the clock ticked its next backward second, she was hauled bodily through the open window and into the night.

With a winding thud, she found herself lying across one of the tree's thicker boughs. As a child heights never seemed to bother her. Only as an adult did she become wary, too conscious of how brittle one's body could be. How arduous it was to repair it. She darted the ground a look and clung to the tree with a renewed sense of self-preservation.

In an awkward spot to be extricated from, Sarah decided she had no immediate wish to acquaint herself with gravity and plaster casts. Maybe when this tree stopped shaking, a fire-crew would randomly stumble across her and loan their expandable ladder. And an obliging Dalmatian to maul Jareth with. The damnable wretch who stood with one foot on the base of Sarah's branch, casually leaning against the trunk and looking entirely too pleased with himself.

"Enjoying ourselves, are we?" he asked.

Sarah clamped her knees against the flaking bark. Perhaps it was not so far down to fall?

"Just as much as your use of inclusives," she said. "Stop that for a start and put me back." The branch bent slightly, quaking as Jareth shifted his weight.

"Back?" he queried. "Whatever for? Really Sarah, for a first outing you are proving to be a most uncooperative and disagreeable play-fellow. You've hurt my feelings." No response came from the oversized, Sarah-shaped lichen. His voice dropped into a wondering drawl. "Can it be you do not like the play equipment? Such a shame. I went to so much trouble over it, too."

The branch swayed sickeningly. "You could always climb down and find something else. Hurry along, we haven't got all night."

Sarah mumbled indistinctly into the bark.

"Pardon?" said Jareth sweetly, "I couldn't quite catch that."

"I _said_," began Sarah (wishing lightening would fortuitously strike Jareth from the tree), "that I can't and you bloody well know it. If you won't put me back, at least put me on the ground. Safely," she added.

"Please," he said.

"What?"

"You forgot to say 'please'."

"Don't be ridiculous, I'm not going to-"

"No please, and one little push will prove you happily pushing up peonies for Persephone." The branch shuddered deliberately.

"You wouldn't… that's horrible!" Sarah cried out.

"Maybe I would, and yes, but overall I don't care much for moralizing actions. Manners, however, are in a different crock altogether. Say 'please' and I will overlook the glaring fact you were raised in an uncouth farmyard."

Sarah looked at the ground again. A cast wouldn't be so bad, she thought. Toby would love to draw and paint it.

"Well?" Jareth asked, pausing to cup a hand around his ear mockingly.

"Please," said Sarah through grinding teeth.

"Please, what?"

"Please help me to get down from this tree, you self-obsessed lunatic."

The branch stopped jolting and Sarah thought she heard a low-pitched snicker.

"Close enough. Certainly Sarah, I shall be delighted to help you. Just as soon as you empty your pockets."

"What?" said Sarah, feeling very much stuck in a repetitive loop.

"Come now, don't be coy. We both know you're stashing salt. I can't get close enough to assist if you insist on keeping it."

Lightly, Jareth sauntered further out onto the branch. "Otherwise, I could simply break the bough. Messy, yet effective. Although I should put in here that I have neither horses nor men to put you back together again." He arched an eyebrow as Sarah reached a trembling hand behind and turned out the pockets of her jeans. Salt spiraled through the air and landed with a barely discernable pit-pit-pattering on the ground below. To Sarah, it sounded like the cracking rumble of a snare-drum. She'd thrown away the one piece of concrete insurance she had. The water pistol was still tucked into a back pocket, for now hidden by the bulk of her jumper. All she could do was to offer a feeble, silent prayer it would stay that way and trust she had good hand-eye-coordination when the time came.

"There now," Jareth cooed, "see how much easier things are when you're agreeable? You've wasted a good ten minutes already." Stooping, Jareth took hold of Sarah's jumper by the scruff and peeled her from the branch with some difficulty. "Best to keep your eyes shut," he said. "Otherwise you'll be sick, and you have no idea how hard it is to remove vomit stains from clothing."

Sarah wriggled her arms and legs a little in mid-air, testing the Goblin King's grip and looking remarkably similar to a flailing baby turtle.

"An hour," she said suspiciously, "does not translate into Goblin as, 'let's spend an hour trying to lure Sarah Underground', you know. So why the need for shut eyes?"

Jareth huffed. "You've a very mistrusting personality, has anyone ever told you that? We're not going far- the woods behind your house. But I'll be taking the faster way. Be it on your own head not to follow kindly advice." Without another word he stepped from the branch and into the empty air, pulling Sarah down with him as he fell. The tree was lost in a blur, and Sarah quickly gave herself over to closed eyes- reasoning that when the hard ground came bolting upwards to collect her broken neck, it would be at least a short-lived surprise she wouldn't see coming.

In amongst the whistling wind, her ears somehow managed to pick out rustling feathers and the dry rattle of dead leaves. Shortly after, sweeping rushes of cold air incited her stomach to flop about like a landed fish. It would be worth the humiliation of throwing up just to see the indignity on Jareth's face, she thought. As she set about trying to collect appropriate quips and witticisms (to hurl with equal grace and humor), she was interrupted by Jareth shouting something, his voice wavering and frayed by the wind.

'Brace' it sounded like. Though it might have been mace, place, or suitcase just as easily. Sarah was gearing herself up to shout that a suitcase full of mace would indeed be a very handy object to have for someone in her position, when she felt herself barreling into a particularly deep leaf-drift. A crinkling, crunching stop and she thought she might by lying on her back. It's rather difficult to tell when you're feeling queasy and half-buried.

"You can open your eyes now," said Jareth above her head.

Sarah wrinkled her nose and managed to rescue a hand from the leaf-pile to rub her clammy forehead.

"I will just as soon as the world stops spinning and my brain re-solidifies. Both for which I blame you. Entirely."

"A drop in the ocean," Jareth scoffed, picking tawny feathers from a jacket sleeve, "or a star in the sky seems more fitting tonight. They're being born and dying glorious deaths millions of miles away and you're lying there like a lump missing the entire thing."

Tentatively, Sarah cracked an eyelid. "Oh." Between the interlocking mesh of autumn twigs and branches, the cosmos had been snared- swirling and gleaming in spite of its paltry earthen fetters.

"Why you unappreciative and unobservant people were given these never ceases to stagger me."

Sarah sprang into a sitting position, startled by the close proximity of Jareth's voice. He was seated in the leaves not two paces away- looking up into the sky. She had not heard him move.

"Don't be silly," she said, attempting to slide subtly away from him. "What makes you think they belonged to anyone to give in the first place?"

Head still tilted upwards, Jareth eyed her sideways. "Why are there no stars Underground then? If they weren't bound in some manner, why don't they wander and stray as they please?"

Sarah stood and noisily waded a few steps through the leaves. Jareth was too close for comfort.

"Well, physics and atomic fission for a start. They couldn't possibly-"she broke off, jumping as Jareth appeared in front of her- burning irises that outshone the ones above.

"Then answer me this," he hissed. "Why am I bound here? Why can't I sleep peaceably Underground?" With each 'why' Jareth strode forward, bailing Sarah against a tree and leaning inwards to murmur in her ear. She felt the warm vapor of his breath soft against her cheek. "Why do you keep me? What do you _want _from me?"

Sarah could not look at him directly. She instead focused on the clean angles of his collarbone. And the plastic water pistol now pressing into the small of her back. Space. She needed space before she did something unbelievably stupid.

Half falling, half stumbling, she pushed herself away from the tree, away from his bare skin. Taking the water pistol from her back pocket, she turned and held it level with his chest. She hoped the expression on her face would belay the trembling of her hands.

"I want you to leave me alone," she said. "I want you to stop treating me like some _thing_ you can pick up and play with when there's nothing better around."

Jareth regarded her levelly, hands slightly raised, palms facing outwards.

"You don't want to do that," he said.

"No?" Sarah asked, voice hitching, "On the contrary, I think I want to very much. Would you be so narcissistic with half of your pretty face blistered and peeling away?"

"I believe the term you're searching for is 'handsome', and yes, undoubtedly. Put that down."

"Absolutely not. I will not be told what to say or do. I am not your subject."

"Yet," said Jareth evenly. "Very well, I can see you are going to insist on belligerence. I'll call on you again tomorrow and see if you have come to your senses."

"I am in my right mind already Jareth."

"I've reservations about that." Straightening his jacket collar, Jareth whirled around and strolled away through the trees. "Irrationality will only carry you so far Sarah," he called out from over a shoulder, "what then? Where will you go?"

She watched his retreating back melt into the night and lowered the water pistol, hands shaking violently. She caught fading bars of whistled music- strains she had heard before but could not place. Then, a barely audible sing-song voice winding back through the tree trunks.

"Where will you go in the dark, without a light, without a mark?"

**a/n: Where, indeed? I hope you all enjoyed this chapter! I rather liked writing it, despite Flitt the barista-goblin muttering incessantly. Something like, 'workplace conditions', 'third-degree burns', and 'sour milk', or some such nonsense.**

**The reviews for last chapter were splendid! I had oodles of fun reading them. However, I have learnt my lesson and will not assume myself to be above raspberry jam- it's probably safer to lord it over a miscellaneous variety of chutney, forgotten in the back of the fridge.**

**Welcome to G.K., new readers! (And regulars, I can certainly say you're better than jam without fear of repercussion.)**

**Vic Wit, you've put me in mind of a BBC series called 'Lost in Austen'- try looking it up for a very humorous exploration of Dary & Elizabeth. :3**

**Thank-you all again! Please share your thoughts!**

**Cheers. (I away to apologize to condiments.) **


	16. Raspberry Jam Makes An Appearance

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Sixteen: In Which Raspberry Jam Makes An Appearance.**

If filching things was to a goblin as bread to a hungry orphan, then suspicion was their butter. The snatchers had good cause to shoot each other worried, puzzled looks. Never had they seen their king look so… _happy._ Sloughing off the crossing magick Underground, Jareth simply radiated white heat- absently patting the head of a servant as he passed it on the stairs to his room. Shrieks were heard as the unfortunate creature's scalp seared. It was terribly disturbing. The act of simple kindness that is, rather than the casual maiming.

Jareth sat on the wide windowsill and pulled off his boots- pressing the soles of his burning feet into the cold stone. He felt as though he could melt a hole straight through it. Shuttering his eyes, Jareth leaned back against the window arch- his face the very picture of a cream-thieving cat. Sarah was weakening, very near breaking. Her irrational behavior he pegged to uncertainty rather than planned bravado. She was unsure of him, and that made her dangerous.

Jareth loosened the ties of his shirt at the neck and cuffs- the fabric scorched a stiff brownish-black. Perhaps a more subtle, delicate touch was required?

"_Return Underground willingly, or in a narrow wooden box." _Too tacky.

"_Y'know that friend of yours? Whatsisname… Hogbreath? Yeah, Kentucky Fried Goblin… Sorry 'bout that." _Too obvious.

"_This catapult keeps jamming. Must be something to do with all the feathers- you'd be doing me a favor if you took a look-see at it." _Too improbable.

"_Come back, I need you here." _Too real.

"_Don't go."_ Too raw.

Growling- a soft noise of frustration, Jareth opened his eyes and swung his legs to the floor. Why did everything have to become so twisted and complicated? In eons past, males of his kind were off abducting Aboveground wenches every other week. Most of them were feeble, easily persuaded. Only the rare shrew kept a little iron dagger about her person for just such an occasion. Walking to the wash-stand, Jareth left a trail of blackened footprints on the embroidered floor rugs. Steam roiled about his head as he splashed water onto the hissing skin of his hands and face.

Wreathed in vapor, he appeared to be an uppity Aboveground angel- smoking skin, ember eyes, and tearing at the seams with a religious conviction bordering on the ungodly. He knew what was right. What must pass. Sarah was going to falter. He would swoop. He would win. Shedding the charred remains of his clothes onto the floor, Jareth slid between the clean linen bed-sheets and stretched full-length with a luxurious sigh. Tomorrow night was the night. The night he stole the queen from her chessboard.

………

There didn't seem to be a point in staying within the house. Not after last night. Sarah stuffed a backpack with a warm jacket, thermos full of hot tea and laced her sturdy walking shoes on the outside steps.

Street lamps swam with a faint orange glow in the grey, misty time before true sunrise. With a look of misgiving to her closed front door- she chafed her cold hands and set off at a brisk pace down the street. She didn't know where she was going, so she felt she hadn't been lying when she left a note on the kitchen counter with, _'Gone for a walk.' _scribbled hastily across it. However, siding with a rising streak of cowardice, she decided she couldn't commit to adding, _'Taken the dog.' _or, _'Gone to fetch the paper.' _or even _'Back later.' _All the usual phrases that would still her family's concern seemed too impossible. Monstrously inadequate. For now she was walking when the world around her slept, and that was enough.

Eventually Sarah came to the end of her street and turned left; following the pavement she knew would feed into one of the many main roads leading into the town's business district. An early morning cyclist click-clacked towards her from the other side of the road- flashing a brief smile before whirling away again into the mist- their red LED tail-light blinking like a dreaming electronic eye.

The grey light slowly became tinged with a soft yellow. It would take a while for the weak sun to burn through the mist and take the chill edge from the air. Sarah stopped at a bakery, feeling her skin thaw with the warm, fresh scents of bread and pastries as soon as she stepped inside the door. She bought a hot, buttery croissant, a tiny sachet of raspberry jam, and sat down to eat them at a small square table up against the far wall. Fishing out the thermos from her backpack, she drank an unhurried cup of tea and gave herself over to the sweeping sensation of finality that had crept in the door behind her- now climbing up her feet and stretching out blind tentacles to weigh down upon her heart.

Nothing she did was going to make a difference. It would be easier to catch the cosmos in a butterfly net. Sarah brushed the crumbs from her lap and pulled her arms through her warm jacket, shouldering the door sideways and stepping out on to the street.

Dried sweat from walking and the snug confines of the bakery made the cold outside air cut through her clothing- catching her breath in time to her quiet footsteps on the empty pavement.

It was noon by the time she cleared the town, and early evening when she crossed the last pedestrian-walk, the main sealed road then dwindling into compacted gravel before disappearing amongst the wild, overgrown town outskirts.

A small wooden bench with flaking green paint by the side of the road stood next to a battered-looking metal signpost, the latter declaring the former to be a bus-stop.

The bus timetable had been torn from the post, so Sarah lowered herself onto the bench to wait: hungry, tired, and resigned. The sun had made a brief appearance during the day, only to be quickly ousted by the gathering night. So Sarah was vaguely surprised when she felt warmth creeping down her neck and back, long after the fading yellow sunlight had been doused.

"Sarah," chided a voice quietly, "What are you doing here by yourself?"

**a/n: Chapter Sixteen! Featuring jam! We all knew it had to happen. :D I hope you've all had a nice end-of-year holiday. I received some Nickolaus tea (marzipan-flavored) and Portuguese coffee from the wanderings of my caffeine-enabling relatives. It is the season to inspire clemency from stimulant bans, after all. :3**

**I hope you've enjoyed reading this chapter- with a resurrected laptop (it needed a complete lobotomy, much consoling petting and a new drive, poor chap), I'll be mindful of trying to update more often. Please share your thoughts! :D**


	17. The Practicalities of Wearing a Coat

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Seventeen: The Invaluable Practicalities of Wearing a Coat. **

The stony ground before the bench suddenly appeared enormously fascinating to Sarah. Each pebble, each spiny, roadside weed required prompt and intense examination.

"Waiting for a bus," she replied to the blandly. "It's curious I should be doing this at a designated bus-stop. The unexpectedness of it all is sure to cause riots amongst the other peasants. Have a care to your delicate neck lest there are lynch-mobs prowling the streets.

At her back the glowing warmth faded, shifting to her left-hand side. With a practiced movement Jareth flicked out the tails of his coat and sat on the other end of the bench.

"Touching concern," he remarked mildly. "I hadn't a clue nooses were still fashionable up here. Though I suppose if left alone for long enough everything comes back into season. It shan't be too long before we're fleeing from sharpened pitchforks and vats of bubbling oil."

"We?" Sarah queried, studying a pattern she was tracing into the dirt with the tip of her shoe. "I've already explained to you about inclusives. You want a singular in there."

Bending over Jareth picked up a small flat stone and expertly skimmed it across the road, the ground strangely rippling where it struck- just like water. Gallantly managing to skip four times the stone sank from sight, swallowed up by the opposite edge of the road.

"No," said Jareth. "I don't."

Sarah's eyes flicked from her own dusty, scuffed shoes to Jareth's. Those immaculate high-topped boots of polished black leather so at odds with their surroundings.

"I don't know what you mean," she said.

"I think you do," said Jareth. "But your inability to follow a line of thought laterally has most conveniently blinded you to the reality of the situation. Where would you go once you stepped inside that smelly metal box with wheels?"

"The bus," corrected Sarah, "not a box."

Jareth waved a hand dismissively. "Yes, yes, details," he said. "Desist the evasive vocabulary lesson and answer the question please."

Sarah paused. "Anywhere. Anywhere away from here. I would say Crusoe's island but I don't think the city's buses are very well equipped to drive underwater."

"There are cannibals on that island too you know," said Jareth.

"I thought as much," muttered Sarah miserably.

"Anywhere," repeated Jareth. "Forgive me, but I'm skeptical whether you really meant that." _Softly, softly bait the trap..._

Sarah kicked at the ground with the heel of her shoe- petulance creeping into her face and voice. "I meant it," she said firmly, "though I don't see why I have to prove myself to you of all people."

"I'm not a person," interjected Jareth.

Sarah waved a hand, mimicking the Goblin King. "Semantics," she said.

"Anywhere?" said Jareth again, tasting the syllables as they rolled about his mouth and tripped off his tongue. _Open the door…_

"Yes."

"… Underground qualifies as a lovely forgotten corner of anywhere." _Then shut it, SNAP!_

Sarah sat very still on the end of the bench- heart thrumming against her ribs. She had just looped the wire snare about her neck and quite happily handed the end to Jareth. "… I suppose it does…" she said slowly.

"An anywhere filled with neglected friends and undiscovered delights," persisted Jareth. "What teenage runaway wouldn't dream of that?"

"I'm not running away," said Sarah, lifting her eyes from Jareth's boots to his rayon-clad knee.

"If you say so. You're taking the bus, aren't you?"

Sarah looked at the cuff of Jareth's shirt sleeve, much longer than that of his coat. The fabric seemed oddly blackened and singed at the wrist.

"Sarah," said Jareth very quietly, "won't you come back? Just for a little while?"

She eyed the pulse beneath the skin of his neck- the slow steady beating of a thing that would go on living forever, even when the world Above had forgotten and forsaken him, just out of defiant spite.

"Sarah? It really will be just a little while. By the time you return, only an hour or so will have passed."

A magpie cut across the evening sky on its way to roost. As Sarah watched it fly overhead, she couldn't help but be distracted by stray filaments of Jareth's burning-gold hair.

"I wish I could believe that," she murmured.

"You can," said Jareth, sounding slightly offended. "Haven't I always granted your wishes before?" He stood and held out his hand to her with a cleverly fabricated air of nonchalance. "You have my word. If you decide to return to this place, it will still be the same day, the same year."

"When," said Sarah.

"What?"

"When, not if. The two words are not interchangeable."

"As you say." Jareth twitched the ends of his fingers- beckoning.

Sarah felt none of the hesitation she damn well knew she ought to be feeling- no overwhelming fear or anxiety, just the strange sensation of fluidity as Jareth's fingers closed over hers. It was all too simple; too easy. That alone should have served as the most terrible of warnings.

Yet Sarah made her peace with rational arguments and their likely consequences. Setting them down on the stony ground below the bench, she encouraged them to steal upon another aimless traveler, to urge her not to take the hand of a familiar stranger offering fragile promises he could not possibly keep. The other girl would come to her senses- go home and comfort her crying mother and in time forget all about her wretchedness and be happy.

Sarah's hand seemed like it had melted from her body. Inexplicably pitched forward, she collided with Jareth's chest and felt his other arm circle her waist- drawing her still closer.

Ground, bench and road fell away in a torrent of cold air- screaming against her ears and tearing at her hair.

_Yes, _she thought simply. _The other girl will forget and be happy._

………

"You haven't walked this way before, so I'm not altogether sure how things will pan out," said Jareth. They stood by the hazel trees at the end of Sarah's backyard, the calm blackness of the night pressing down upon them.

"That doesn't exactly inspire confidence," said Sarah, stretching down to rub her jarred ankle. She doubted if she'd ever be able to manage a safe landing following one of Jareth's aerial abductions. But then it's rather difficult to have a choice in the matter when you're being dropped from the air like an unwieldy sack of cement.

"Honesty is the best policy when dealing with the unexpected," said Jareth primly. "You might turn up Underground with five eyes and your hands on backwards if I don't pay close attention."

Sarah blanched.

"But you won't, because I will," said Jareth quickly.

"Can't we use a mirror or something?" she asked feebly. "Like last time?"

Jareth took a step forward, two long strides to the right and a small hop backwards. Holding out the index finger of his left hand, he began to trace a peculiar and complicated symbol in midair- the lines gleaming bright silver before quickly tarnishing and fading.

"We might have," said Jareth distractedly, "had your neurotic tendency to seal the mirrors off not made it an impossibility."

"Oh."

"Indeed."

Jareth carefully lowered his hand from the sign and nodded approvingly. "It will hold. Now Sarah, you must listen _very_ closely. In a moment I am going to open the fracture. Regardless of what you might see or hear on _no _account must you let go of my hand. Do you understand?"

Sarah tilted her head minutely, allowing herself to be folded into his arms. The fingers of one hand knotted though his while the rest clutched at a coat lapel.

"Should you get lost," he murmured into her hair, "just make your way towards the castle- you remember where it is. Though I expect I shall find you long before then."

"A little cocky, aren't we?" Sarah muttered against his coat. Jareth laughed- a low, rolling vibration she felt bubbling up through his chest.

"Centuries of practice may tend to weigh the odds a tad in my favor," he said. "But I'll certainly answer a challenge thrown- especially if it's from your fearsome gauntlet. Remember what I've told you?"

"Yes," said Sarah, screwing her eyes shut and burying her face deeper into Jareth's coat.

"Good girl."

Jareth spoke a stream of garbled, nonsensical words. Each one sprang into the world with an uncertain snarl before bolting in the direction of the hazel trees. Before they disappeared, Sarah thought she heard something rip. A single long tearing sound like a knife being drawn across a taut bed-sheet.

She felt herself blurring at the edges- pulled in every possible direction at once. The only thing stopping her from evaporating into tendrils of not-quite-reality were those burning fingers interlocked with her own.

There came a resounding peal of thunder and they were gone- leaving the hazels to quietly rustle and sway in an unnatural wind.

**a/n: Chapter Seventeen! Now we know why it so terribly handy to prance about in coat with both tails and lapels. I imagine the lining to be stuck all over with pockets brimming with impractical things- pebbles, marbles and incomplete memos-to-self detailing vendettas (or shopping lists- perhaps the writing is smudged).**

**I hope you all liked reading this chapter! Your reviews for sixteen were lovely- very encouraging and constructive. They help me to get into a writing routine, knowing people expect to read more of G.K. It'd be nice to see what you all made of this.**

**Please share your thoughts! Cheers. :D**


	18. The Unlikely Charms of the Ravenous Dead

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Eighteen: The Unlikely Charms of the Ravenous Dead.**

Sarah later found it rather difficult to recall what had happened next. Hazel twigs, fallen leaves and the distant view of her house fused together to form a wheeling kaleidoscope of dim night-time colours. As suddenly as they had melded, these small eclectic pieces of Sarah's world broke apart and dissolved, falling away behind her in great billowing clouds of relinquished reality. She and Jareth seemed to be hurtling forward while simultaneously standing still, in the midst of a space that was everything and nothing all at once.

It was the heat she would later remember. The heat she blamed as the cause of her disobedience. Jareth's fingers, once quite pleasantly warm and alive and locked with her own began to hurt. At first she hazily thought he was gripping her hand too tightly. An attempt to extricate her fingers failed. She thought she felt Jareth's chin brush against her hair- a dissuading shake of his head. She clutched at his coat tighter and tried to forget about it.

But the pain would not be ignored. She tentatively let go of his lapel and lightly touched their joined hands. It was then she became acutely aware of the problem. Her skin was burning. Blistering. Cracking. The more attention her mind threw at it, the worse the pain grew. Finally she could bear no more- her brain howled commands of self-preservation. Using one hand to hold the captured wrist of the other, she started to prise herself loose.

Jareth, half-attending to both Sarah and the complicated magicks of the crossing did not realize what she was about until it was all too late. She tugged her hand free of his with a strangled cry of pain- pushing away from his chest with only the thought of relieving this appalling heat that was seething up her arm and boiling away the logic behind her eyes. He snatched at her wrist, her jacket sleeve, her shoulder- each time she slipped his hold, overridden by a primal desire to keep herself safe from harm. Thrashing violently, she twisted out of his arms and into the everything-nothing.

Sarah later remembered the look on Jareth's face above everything else. She had never seen him wear it before, a look of ashen dismay and panic she found quite bewildering. What was there to be alarmed about? Only when she looked down to check on her scorched hand did Sarah understand. She was dissolving. Breaking down into billions upon billions of tiny pieces and rapidly scattering upwards like gravity-defying confetti.

She did not know if the splintered scream came from her mouth or Jareth's. Low-pitched, it hung in the air for scarcely a moment before it was consumed by the everything-nothing. She heard snatches of it surfacing and fading all around her, gaining strength and volume with each rendition. Her mind slowly drifted apart and Sarah knew no more.

………

Jareth sat amongst the red dust and grey pebbles on the Labyrinth's outskirts. He sat and considered the following: he had finally wrung from Sarah her leave to be taken Underground. He had told her she would come to no grief if she implicitly followed his instructions. He asked her in so many words to be acquiescent. And what does little Miss Contrary decide to do? _The exact, FLIPPING opposite. _

Wearily, Jareth stood and began to beat his coat clean of dust and crossing magick. Why was it so taxing for someone to do what he asked of them? Particularly when it served their own interest to do so? An orange-tinged light flooded the corners of the sky above the Labyrinth- the faux sun indicating the start of a new, trying, wretched day.

With a sinking feeling Jareth recalled the look of surprise on Sarah's face as she watched her hand being devoured by the everything-nothing. She had glanced back to him then- mirroring his expressions in horrible detail. He held a brittle hope that the spell he frantically shouted was heard above the awful, wailing screams. That she would be drawn through the other side of the fracture safely, complete, and severely repentant. That she would deign never again to draw his heart into his mouth, to make him chew each unpalatable beat of that treacherous organ he was now trying to grapple back into a slow, methodical rhythm.

He lightly swung himself up amongst the low branches of a dead tree, habitually dodging the blackened thorns as he stepped onto the Labyrinth's crumbling outer wall. From here the stone maze was neat, orderly, and deceptively simple. The passages ran wide and straight.

Yet even now deep in forgotten corners and dead ends unnamable things skulked- wild and irreproachable. They had lived there since before the goblins had shut themselves away from the sunlight and would endure until time had left everything else behind. They knew nothing of law, nothing of reason- only the casual abandonment of actions necessary for survival.

Jareth set off along the wall at a brisk pace, careful to where he put his feet on the decaying stone. It would not do to fall into one of his own traps whilst attempting to rescue the damsel. Jareth dwelt upon the certain humiliation that would follow as he negotiated a wide jump between two walls.

_No,_ he thought, _it would not do at all. _

………

It was the pain that spurred Sarah to crawl back into a world of conscious thought. The skin of her left hand throbbed, striped raw in the exact pattern of Jareth's long, vice-like fingers. For the longest of times she simply lay where she had fallen, prone and uncaring among the exposed roots of a giant petrified tree. Oblivion within the everything-nothing was starting to feel like a pretty picnic of a holiday compared to this.

With effort she managed to bully her right hand into lifting its dead weight to touch the back of her head, the palm coming away wet and sticky.

_Oh dear, _she thought,_ I've sprung a leak. _The sheer silliness of the thought caught her in a convulsion of coughing laughter, leaving her quite breathless and aching all over. As she brought her hysteria to heel, Sarah levered herself up into a sitting position and tried to make sense of where she was.

The tree at her back was one of many, many more. She might have said she was in the woods behind her house were it not for one or two glaring differences. Every tree as far as the eye could see, was dead. Deceased. Perished. Lifeless. In such a barren wasteland one would expect to be overwhelmed by nothingness- yet as Sarah quickly discovered, there was movement, and there was sound. Granted both were fleeting and stealthy- but she knew they were there, lurking behind tree trunks and casting no shadows.

Several hundred yards away there seemed to be a slight gap among the static vegetation- slyly suggesting possibilities of a wall, of a way beyond these conspiratorial rustlings and chirps. Pinning down the gap with a fierce glare (she trusted the trees just as much as she did the walls), Sarah leaned back heavily on her right shoulder and slowly slid herself into an uneasy stand, smearing blood across the bark as she went. The gap was still there, a vivid anomaly in the unchanging scenery.

_I would not tread that way if I were you._ A dusty voice. Summer wind across parched earth.

It made Sarah's sweat run cold, mingling with the blood in her hair to trickle steadily down her neck. That she could not see the voice's owner did not bother her particularly. Goblins and their kind were adept at choosing when to be seen and by whom. No, what frightened her was the way it appeared to originate in the back of her mind, casting about blindly until it found a way to reach her ears.

"I beg your pardon?" she asked, politely trying to establish whether she was crazier than a cat in a bathtub.

_You heard._

"Yes," Sarah agreed, "about that-"

_You are not deranged Sarah Williams._

"No? Well. If you say so, I suppose it's all settled then." She paused, concluding she was not mad because the thing now insinuating itself into her synapses had told her so. A simplistic approach perhaps, but Sarah rather warmed to the idea of conversing with a sinister specter (as opposed to her life coming to an abrupt and grisly end). "Disregarding the obvious question of how you know my name… why can't I go forwards? I don't see another way through…" She trailed off, eyeing the gap between the trees with a renewed sense of suspicion and mistrust.

_The most direct route does not always imply the straightest._

"Wonderful. We've descended into riddle-realm."

_Not fiction,_ swirled the dusty voice, _not fable. Fact. Some of us walk where we please. Not where we are meant to. Us can mean Champion. Us can mean you._

Sarah blinked. A rapid movement taking a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The gap between the trees vanished as though it had never existed.

"Why are you helping me?" she whispered. "What do you want?"

It took so long to reply Sarah thought the voice had gone, worming its way so deep into her subconscious it was incapable of answering.

_Colour, _it said simply. _Strands to complete the weave. The Underground has never seen this shade of red before._

"…That doesn't make sense."

_It will. You can not see your part in the design for the threads. _

The voice then came apart, desiccated vowels snatched up by the ravenous dead; air, trees and earth.

_Unraveling only makes knots._

**a/n: Presenting Chapter Eighteen, my pretties! I hope you've all enjoyed reading it as much as I liked writing it.**

**My thanks to everyone who takes the time to review this story. I got some excellent feedback last time on how to improve my writing- things I hadn't noticed before or had quite forgotten about (rather conveniently… *cough*). **

**I also love reading comments on the bits you like (Jareth seems a staple, surprise! ;D). It makes my coffee/inappropriate smirking addictions seem entirely rational and justified.**

**Enjoy your week, everyone. Please share your thoughts! Cheers. :D**


	19. The Political Intricacies of Ladybirds

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Nineteen: The Political Intricacies of Rampaging Ladybirds.**

Jareth did not know Underground trees to bleed. Sporadically recite rubbish poetry or engage passers-by in a game of backgammon perhaps, but never bleed. After much toil and vexation he had reached the Labyrinth's wild quarter largely un-harassed. There had been a minor incident involving something large and hairy with lots of legs attempting to suck out his brain from his ears. Happily though, the matter was quickly resolved with a friendly application of fire followed by a prompt impalement.

Running a hand over the damp bark, Jareth found his parchment palm streaked with dull red. Trees do not bleed. Silly little scatterbrains with complete disregard to their own mortality do. With a resigned sigh, Jareth fetched out a snowy handkerchief from a coat pocket and carefully restored his skin to its prior immaculate state. He had no way of telling which way she had gone; only that she had been here. He knew that as surely as he knew something was watching him from the nearby stand of trees- never in focus, never nameable. Pocketing the neatly folded handkerchief, his eyes quickly cast about, skimming over deceptions to waylay the unwary and picking out the true paths.

Little more than roughly-beaten tracks for rabbits they snaked away in all directions. Moving away from the bleeding tree, Jareth struck out along a path seemingly overgrown with the sharp hooked thorns of dead blackberry canes. Rustles in the undergrowth followed him as he went- gathering speed and keeping pace. The sooner he found Sarah, the better.

Minus a quart of blood and possibly delirious, he suspected she'd be rather open to the idea of spending the rest of her days sequestered from harm behind the castle's thick, impenetrable stone walls. And if she wasn't? Jareth skirted a break in the path that was almost certainly a cleverly disguised sinkhole. If she wasn't, then he supposed she might come to understand his reasons in time.

Bleeding, mad people curiously seem to give up their right to self-determination. Awfully convenient, really.

…

Sarah felt the throbbing lessen and gradually subside as her blood clotted and made her hair matted and stiff. If was one thing to have her mind twist in on itself and wax philosophical, quite another to stay lost in this desolate wasteland and discover herself to be a choice delicacy amongst the locals.

Tottering slowly away from the tree, Sarah dimly recalled the tricksy Labyrinth walls of her youth. Things are never what they seem. Not even when they're right in front of you, dancing up and down in a frilly yellow-and-pink dress while a woeful, downtrodden monkey in a moth-eaten waistcoat grinds away at an organ in the corner. Scarcely had the mild surprise of her feet taking some kind of direction registered, when she looked up and spied a turret of pale stone between the dry twigs and petrified branches. Some distance off, and likely an unpleasant slog uphill, but it was there. The castle beyond the Goblin City where she might sit down in the cool, leafy gardens and not feel dirty and tired and lost.

With steely resolve, Sarah emptied her shoes of pebbles, picked thorns from her socks, and resisted the urge to scream and stamp her feet when the laces she was retying brushed against raw skin on the back of her hand. If she had any energy left at all by the time she reached the castle, Sarah thought she would delight in pulling off her scuffed, dusty shoes and throwing them both in quick succession at Jareth's fractious head. Fancy mangling someone- a guest no less, by gripping her hand. The very idea.

Cheered by notions of doling out deserved revenge, Sarah picked up her feet and began to make her way through the spiny undergrowth on either side of the path. With the right amount of speed, her shoes might just be capable of producing a lovely two-note thunking sound as they connected with Jareth's skull.

…

"Yes," said the wooly orange caterpillar, regretting delaying the spinning of its hard-shelled cocoon. When one is snoozing within one's cocoon, one is at perfect liberty to ignore unsolicited social visits by enormous bipedal monsters. Even if said monsters happen to include the Underground's current reigning sovereign.

"Yes you've seen her, or yes you haven't?"

"Yes," replied the caterpillar, a little uncertainly.

"Which is it?"

"Umm…" the caterpillar paused to consider the question for a moment, politely finishing with, "Which yes would you prefer?"

Stifling a small sound of frustration, Jareth retracted his outstretched fingers from the insect and linked them behind his back, away from itching temptation. Lowering his face so that the entire creature was reflected in his unblinking eye, Jareth began to speak slowly and carefully, ensuring each syllable was clear and crisp.

"Nice place you've got here."

"Yes," the caterpillar agreed warmly, grateful for a change in topic.

"Only…"

"What?" Inching closer to Jareth's iris on its many legs, the caterpillar's interest piqued. It was, after all, an immensely house-proud animal. One instilled with an innate sense of maintaining neighborhood appearances.

"It doesn't matter."

"No, go on, really."

"Well… alright. It would only be a shame if such a lovely little dwelling like this was inexplicably overrun by birds and small hopping, insectivorous mice."

The caterpillar's wool stood on end. "That couldn't possibly happen here," it started, "because- oh. I see."

"Yes," smiled Jareth.

"Yes," concurred the caterpillar miserably. "I did see her, now that you mention it. Only briefly mind, as she seemed to fall into something a little further up the passage."

Jareth's pupil narrowed. "Fell?" he said sharply. "Into what? Pit? Short-cut? Gigantic basin of rice pudding?"

"I couldn't say sir. One moment she was there, and the next she wasn't."

"I see," said Jareth, straightening his shoulders and back. "Thank-you. You've been most helpful."

"Yes," replied the caterpillar primly.

"Oh, and one more thing," called Jareth over his shoulder, clicking the fingers of one hand with ill-intent. "Have a care to those hopping mice I mentioned. Awfully numerous in these parts I hear. Cheerio!"

Jareth allowed himself a small smirk before launching into a tuneless whistle, one to cover up the tiny shrieks of horror.

…

Sarah frowned. "This is new," she said, glancing up the flight of hewn rock stairs she had just tumbled down. She was extremely thankful there hadn't been anything sharp and spiky waiting to meet her at the bottom. The wooly orange caterpillar had proven absolutely useless at providing directions. It did not know of anything beyond a few steps from its home in the wall, and nor did it care. In no uncertain terms, it told Sarah a whole square meter was ample space for any one person to spend a lifetime navigating, and would she be so kind as to immediately shove off?

Slightly offended, Sarah complied. Barely three strides away she had lost her footing on the lip of the camouflaged steps and half-fell, half-slid down to the very bottom. Looking back to the top of the stairs, the murky Underground light seemed very far away indeed. To her right the stone floor swept into the pitch maw of a narrow tunnel. Collecting her curiosity Sarah felt a whistling rush of warm wind as she placed an experimental hand on the rough earthen wall. The wind couldn't pass through a tunnel that was blocked on the other end, she reasoned. Unless there was a small hidden army of goblins sweating beneath pedal-powered fans- on the flimsy chance someone might stumble across their lovely dank bolt-hole and decide to wander in for an extended sojourn.

Closing her eyes, Sarah belied a little of the horror that comes with stumbling sightless into the dark unknown. With a shuffling gait, she might almost pretend she was negotiating the main hallway at home. Were it not for the smell of damp earth, an unfamiliar wind stroking her face, and the undulating tunnel floor.

It was impossible to tell if she had made any progress. She knew she was moving, but without a light to see by she could have just as easily been walking on the spot for hours on end. Maybe she had fallen into a Labyrinth pit- one with a moving floor. Maybe above the pit there are benches crammed full of goblins, all pointing and chortling at her piteous expense, gauging how long it will take for her to stop moving, for her to crumple down onto the floor and cry herself into nothingness. Sarah frowned as her shoes splashed softly through a shallow puddle. She hoped her demise wasn't attended by thrown popcorn and toffee apples too. That screamed a special kind of mob crassness.

After a while her feet left the puddles on the floor (puddles of _what_ she didn't care to guess), and began to feel a gentle sandy incline. The wind grew stronger, twitching her nose and pulling at her hair in mischievous little gusts. It spoke to her of freshly cut grass, of pale white water-lilies that bloom only in the blackest of nights. It sounded like crickets and cicadas and mosquitoes all rolled into one- a heady rush of summer noise. The crowning glory a drawn out shriek of,

"_Tulen kohta takaisin!1"_ Sarah paused. An Underground wind could do many things but not, she suspected, speak garbled Finnish.

Hesitantly she cracked open an eyelid, waiting for the inevitable hailstorm of toffee apples to rain down upon her head. It was not forthcoming. Stranger still she saw a lighter patch of bluish-grey just ahead in the velvet blackness. A way out. Using the pitted wall for support, Sarah almost dragged herself along the last few steps, sandy floor disappearing beneath soft and springy turf. The gentle slope evened out and the tunnel wall abruptly stopped.

For once there was no reek of mould, no sound of pikes or pitchforks or salad-tongs being sharpened. Only the clean, fresh smells of growing things and the quiet-

"_Olann an cat cluin bainne leis!2" _said a voice in her ear.

Sarah tried not to scream. Really she did. But she had spent so many hours of not-screaming that the strangled little cry was bound to slip out. It was enough to send a tall, lanky someone scrambling up the nearest tree. Once there they regarded her reproachfully in the dusky purple twilight.

Cautiously stepping from the tunnel mouth, Sarah hobbled to the base of the tree. "Won't you come down?" she asked. "I'm sorry if I frightened you."

"_Go hifreann leat!3"_ came the snappish reply. Gaelic perhaps.

"Jareth?"

"_An feidir liom cabhru leat?4"_

"My mistake. You look like him. Sort of." Sighing, Sarah pushed away from the tree, mercifully turning just in time to avoid the replicae's extensive vocabulary of rude hand gestures.

In the warm stillness of the not-quite evening, she settled into the grass beneath a carved fountain and listened to the sound of water playing over stone, stretching out luxuriously on her back. The pain gnawing at her hand and the back of her head seemed less somehow, soothed by garden that brooked no ridiculous notions such as discomfort. Now she was simply tired. Too tired to stay awake, too tired to sleep.

Too tired to remove the bloody handkerchief that had fluttered through the air to land on her face.

"Explain," said Jareth severely, arranging his limbs to sit cross-legged by Sarah's head.

"I fell over," she replied, muffled by the thin linen square. "It hurt. A lot. Hence the blood." She sneezed as the handkerchief was plucked from her face and struggled to make sense of Jareth's upside-down features.

"Hello," she said, smiling weakly.

"Hello," he returned, tenderly pulling her closer to him so that her head could rest in his lap. Sarah felt herself drifting- lulled into an easy rest as Jareth smoothed her wild hair away from her temples and touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

"Shoes," she murmured.

"What?"

"My shoes," she repeated. "Can you unlace them? Please? I don't think I can." She saw Jareth's face soften as he stretched out over her, untying the knots of her shoes and pulling them from her feet as carefully as he could.

"Give them to me please."

Good humor replaced his hesitation as he deposited them into her open hands. "Thank-you," she added.

"You're welcome," said Jareth, amused by her sudden dive into polite formalities. "Pray tell me, what was that in aid of?" With a rapid twist of his neck he watched Sarah's shoes fly over his shoulder and land in a flowerbed some distance off. Glancing back down to Sarah accusingly, he saw she was smirking.

"I couldn't try that if they were tied to my feet, now could I?"

"Very true," Jareth agreed. "Which is why from now on you'll likely go barefoot."

He traced the curve of her lower lip with his thumb and wondered at her chapped skin. "Why didn't you do as I asked Sarah?" he said quietly. "As we were crossing… was it so very hard? I thought… for a moment…"

By way of response, Sarah raised her injured hand. "I thought you could tell me. I don't really remember everything. It just… I'm sorry. It just hurt so much." His hand closed over hers, blocking the angry red weals from view.

"Don't be sorry," he muttered. "It's my fault. Perhaps the magick was too strong for you. I don't usually travel with passengers.

"You'd be a lousy tour guide," Sarah said genially. "Picking them off left right and center."

"Should I quit while I'm ahead?" he teased, tweaking her nose.

"Oh yes. For the good of humanity."

"That's very species-centric of you."

Sarah shrugged. "I can't help being biased."

They were quiet for a time, watching the fading light and drinking in a rich perfume that could only emerge from water-lilies blooming in the fountain.

"Do you want to go inside?" Jareth asked. "You really ought to get your head looked at. You know, by someone who can do something about it."

"In a minute," said Sarah hazily.

"You're not sleeping in the grass," warned Jareth. "Think of the rampaging ladybirds that might carry you off!" He looked down to expand upon the political intricacies of Underground insects, but was quelled mid-tirade by her perfectly calm face. Behind the flecks of dirt and blood, she radiated exhausted contentment.

"You're not sleeping in the grass without me," he amended, tucking a rogue tendril of hair behind her ear.

...

1 I will be right back!

2 The quiet cat also drinks milk!

3 To hell with you!

4 May I help you?

**References:**

_Finnish Phrases. _(n.d.). Retrieved from: www dot linguanaut dot com/english_finnish dot htm

_Irish Phrases. _(n.d.). Retrieved from: www dot ireland-information dot com/irish phrases dot htm

**a/n: A curious thing it is, to be in the land of the living. One not awash with academic text-books and tiramisu for dinner (when I can have cake anytime I strangely don't want it- it's like sharing your toys when you're five… the logic still applies years later).**

**I hope you all liked reading this chapter! I rather enjoyed writing it- one of the nicest pyjama days I've had in a long while. :D Please share your thoughts!**

**Thank-you always for your kindly reviews and advice. They're an excellent reproachful reminder that I should be writing, sitting in my email inbox with accusing subject lines. This may be my guilt speaking, but hey, whatever gets the job done! :3**

**Take care everyone, and may the Easter bunny have the decency not to chew through your electrical cabling this year.**

**Cheers! :D**


	20. History According to Sock Puppets

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty: History According to Sock Puppets.**

It was the gathering circle of shifty-looking ladybirds that finally broke apart the romantic interlude. Diabolically spotty bugs are not usually given to lurking in formation or appearing suspicious, so Jareth naturally suspected a fiendish plot was brewing. One which hinged on the arrival of greater six-legged numbers.

Cradling Sarah's head in one hand, he shifted his weight to the other and slid his legs from out beneath her. She made a disgruntled noise- the semi-conscious, semi-articulated sound of one who is quite comfortable where she is, thank-you very much.

Jareth froze, Sarah's head still in hand. Of course she was not going to make this easy for him. That would be insultingly kind.

"Sarah?" The query was a gentle murmur, accompanied by a tap on the forehead. "I lied before. You need to wake up. Politically disillusioned insects are massing."

Another noise. A whining sigh peppered with gutturals.

"Ladybirds, Sarah," Jareth reiterated, shooting the former a warning glare. "Come along now, on your feet." At this he hooked his hands beneath her armpits and somehow managed to drag her upright, staggering slightly as she slumped back against him.

"My feet are cold," she mumbled.

"If you'll remember," said Jareth, gripping her shoulders and steering her towards the direction of a concealed doorway, "you forfeited the right to wear shoes scarcely half an hour ago. Mind the step. I wouldn't put it past you to stub your toes and bleed all over my nice clean paving stones."

"But I want my shoes," Sarah said, petulance creeping into her sleep-slurred words.

"Nonsense. What you want is a change of clothing and some salve. Unless you would prefer to leave your scalp crusted over with reddish-brown gunk?" At this he kicked aside a chewed wooden rattle lying forgotten in the middle of the sandstone corridor. "Toys everywhere... this is what the flipping throne-room pit was designed for!"

"Jareth?"

"Sarah," he replied, pushing her out of the corridor and into a small circular room lined with spiralling steps.

"Your paving stones can go to blazes."

...

Sarah rolled over between the scorched linen sheets, waking when she realised she hadn't hit the floor as she would have done at home.

"This isn't my bed," she remarked, levering herself up on her elbows to frown at the pillow. It smelt odd. Sweet, with the undertone of a strange herb she couldn't identify. Carefully, her fingers felt the back of her skull and met a small wad of bandages. This seemed to be the source of the odour, staining her fingertips pale yellow.

"Observant," drawled a voice from the opposite side of the room. "I suppose you're going to spend the entire day naming things that do not belong to you?"

Sarah sat upright, pulling the bed's coverlet about her shoulders as she did so. "Jareth," she said, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and focusing on the window sill.

"Sarah," he nodded, executing a mock half-bow from where he sat. "I do believe we've had this conversation before." There was a knock on the door, opening to three goblins dragging a tin hip-bath. Two more followed close behind, trundling a trolley laden with buckets of hot water.

"I trust you'll want a wash before having something to eat," said Jareth, rising from the window to stand in the doorway.

Sarah looked down at her hands, stained with salve and streaked with dirt. "I suppose so," she said slowly.

"Supposing doesn't factor into it. You look like you've fallen down a chimney." He paused for a response, and on hearing none, turned and left the room.

"Smarmy git," muttered Sarah, gingerly divesting herself of sheets and coverlet to swing her legs to the rug-covered floor. Only then she realised her legs were bare to the knee, disappearing beneath the hem of an oversized shirt. A man's shirt, she thought, face flushing as the trolley was wheeled away and the door shut behind it. A shirt that was probably once deep indigo in colour, but now worn threadbare and faded to a nondescript grey.

Struggling with the carved ivory buttons, she was extremely thankful she had retained her undergarments. The shirt alone would have sent her reaching for the fire-irons. Peeling off what remained of her clothes, she stepped into the bath and eased herself down with a contented sigh. Warmth seeped into her bones, softening bruises and unknotting stiff muscles.

She found a wash-cloth draped over the side of the bath, and although there was no soap, delighted in vigorously sluicing the grime from her skin. Feeling clean, fresh, and very much alive, she splashed out to towel herself dry in front of the fire. A cursory hunt for clothing ended with her own jeans folded over the bed's foot-board, and the shirt she had slept in. The rest seemed to have disappeared in suspicious circumstances. Padding down the spiral stairs she was met by an enchanted hat-stand who shyly handed her an apple.

Quite a feat, she thought, jumping across the step that had nearly tripped her the night before. Especially considering hat-stands have neither hands or are prone to social awkwardness.

The light in the garden was clear and bright, and the grass warm beneath her feet. Choosing the sunniest patch of lawn she could find, she sat down and began stretching her legs. Beside her the apple lay untouched.

Now that she was properly awake, she was beginning to feel peckish. Palming the apple she admired its shiny green skin, faintly tinged with pink. It looked delectable. Delicious. Dubious. The last time she had eaten a piece of fruit Underground, she had been trapped within a waking dream. Insensible to reality, oblivious to the fact she would never normally wear a formal evening dress, let alone one with gargantuan sleeves.

Wistfully, she held the apple beneath her nose, its tangy smell reminding her of a barn loft she once played in when she was small. The apples stored there had been of a similar colour too. Almost exactly the same, now that she really stopped to think about it. She put the apple back down on the grass and looked at it with mistrust. It was poor form to make someone paranoid about breakfast.

"Not hungry?" Jareth materialised in the hidden doorway, waving away the hat-stand's offering of a second glossy apple.

Sarah threw hers backwards over her shoulder, listening to the audible thud as it was caught. "Not for something that will put me in another coma."

Jareth scoffed, inspecting the ground for dissident ladybirds before sitting down a small distance away.

Sunlight had stripped away a measure of the previous evening's candour. He was uncertain if the unspoken protocol between them had changed significantly to allow errant proximity without permission. This made him feel anxious, and as anxiety was a strange and unpleasant weight upon his mind, he fell to smothering it with condescension.

"Children who do not eat their apples forgo their treats."

Sarah arched an eyebrow. "Really? That's the best you can come up with?"

"Children who don't eat their apples succumb to horrible skin diseases?" Jareth retrieved a small stone knife handled in bone from a jacket pocket, and began neatly paring and slicing the apple into quarters. Skewering two on the blade, he reached across and offered them to Sarah.

"Remind me not to let you near Toby."

Jareth waved the knife in what he hoped was a tempting fashion. "Pardon? My memory is somewhat foggy, but I'm fairly sure he enjoyed a riveting account of the plague when he was last here."

Sarah eyed the apple, stomach growling. "Ever again I meant to add," she said.

Jareth put a slice into his own mouth and chewed with deliberate satisfaction.

"You're just saying that because you were busy ferreting about in the Labyrinth. It was an excellent retelling. I've never known a sock puppet to languish and die so convincingly."

"That's disgusting."

"No, what's disgusting is apple gone brown."

Sarah held out an unwilling hand to receive her share, grimacing as Jareth mimicked someone chewing and swallowing- the same pagentry one might perform for a finicky toddler.

"And you promise this won't do anything to me?" She prodded the fruit delicately, not wanting to sully its crisp white flesh.

"Sarah," said Jareth. "Trust me. I promise it won't."

Sarah eyed him sideways then. He returned her glance levelly, face open and guileless as he wiped the knife clean on the grass and returned it to his pocket. She looked back to the apple, hunger gnawing away her apprehension. Raising a slice to her lips, she quickly bit it through, marvelling at its sweet acidity. It was the most apple-y apple she had ever tasted.

Jareth watched her eat the second slice as rapidly as the first, a small smile of appreciation crinkling the corners of his mouth.

"I promise it won't," he repeated again. "Not for ages."

**a/n: Chapter Twenty, m'lovelies! I really must apologise for making you all wait for this instalment. Final assessments have a way of creeping up behind you and screaming, "DEADLINE!" when you're not expecting it. Okay, so maybe you were expecting it, but maybe like me you had your hands clapped over your ears, pretending finals conveniently do not exist.**

**A big thanks to everyone who took the time to review last update- they were delightfully warm and thoughtful.**

**A big BIG thanks to everyone who has taken an interest (however fleeting) in G.K. to date! It has just occurred to me that this story is a little over a year old.**

**So eat some cake, dance like you do not believe in coordination, and avoid falling into the kiddy-pool on your way to leave some feedback! **

**Cheers! :D**


	21. Philistine Philosophy

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-One: Philistine Philosophy **

Sarah fell into great choking coughs- the kind that makes cheeks flush and eyes water involuntarily. With one hand over her mouth, she began beating at her chest with the other, frantically trying to dislodge a wedge of apple caught in her windpipe. It took some moments more of terrified gagging before she was able to force the homicidal snack down towards her sinking stomach.

"I find chewing before swallowing helps the digestive process immensely." Jareth remained seated in the grass a little distance away. Had he felt the inclination, he could have reached out hand and touched her; pat her softly on the back and apologise for startling her. He might have done all these things, had he not known a slap would be waiting for him in return.

"How could you?" Sarah rasped, lurching to her feet. "I trusted you! You promised!"

Jareth linked his hands together, thumbs tapping. It was the mannerism of a child caught misbehaving; sprung playing with matches or foiled trying to post a younger sibling to Ecuador.

"Yes," he said amiably. "About that- I lied. Though I must say I'm rather surprised you believed me. You really ought to know better by now."

Furiously scrubbing her eyes, Sarah struggled to clear a heavy sense of dullness, one that had swiftly begun creeping in from unseen corners to envelop her brain.

"How..." she began weakly.

"The mechanics of it I'm sure you will understand." Jareth rose from the ground, careful not to look at her. Careful not to close the gap and grovel for forgiveness. "Brain to mouth, words over teeth and tongue. What you won't understand, what you will probably shrink from, is the reasoning. Years and months and weeks have all failed. We're left only days. _Days!_ Is it so very wrong to tease them apart, to make them last a little longer? You can't-"

"Shut up!" Sarah shouted, rage crackling through clouded reality. "I understand perfectly. You're a weak, conniving, two-faced, back-stabbing bastard!"

Jareth looked up with a smile that did not meet his eyes. "I know," he said softly.

Sinking back into the grass, Sarah covered her face with her hands. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her heart splinter. "Why I ever thought...I hate you," she muttered, regretting the barb as soon as it had been thrown. Cruelty did not come naturally to her. It sang darkly within her blood, poisoning her tongue. She hated herself for hating him. She hated the way he so casually drew this ugly part of her to the surface.

"You're perfectly entitled to." Jareth's voice was warping- twisting and stretching before Sarah could be sure her ears had properly caught the words.

"I didn't mean it," she said quietly.

"It's alright. You can if you want to."

...

Black feathers reflected her black mood. Alone in a corner of the crowded ballroom, Sarah pulled the mask from her face to find a raven staring back; empty sockets where eyes should be. No one had approached her when she cut a path directly through the lines of dancing couples. Animals and birds she did not recognise spared her sharp stares before returning to the attentions of their partners.

"I suppose I'm doing marginally better than you," she said to the mask, warming to the conversation as one can only do in a dream. "I might wake up. Or not. But you look like you've got no choice one way or the other, poor fellow."

Glancing up, she scanned the parquet floor. If Jareth moved among the dancers, he wasn't about to reveal himself any time soon.

"Typical," she complained to the mask. "Isn't it lovely to conclude an evening of lies and deception with abandonment? What would you say if I spouted nonsensical drivel about keeping you close, if after that I tricked you into staying with me, only to then leave you at the first available opportunity with a roomful of complete strangers? _Imaginary _strangers, if that could possibly make it any more worse."

"Nevermore?" the mask proffered, making Sarah drop it in alarm. Beside her someone chuckled, stooping low to retrieve the fallen object. Cloaked in swathes of inky blue, the newcomer's face could not be seen for the shadows cast by their cowl. Brushing the mask free of non-existent dust, hands clad in dark leather pressed it into Sarah's own.

"My apologies. Temptation proved irresistible."

"Oh?" said Sarah absently, darting a look to her side that screamed of unspoken indifference. "Habit of yours, then? Random acts of childish idiocy?"

"You might say that."

They stood in silence, watching spinning silks as music played by an invisible orchestra changed key and tempo. Strings began to wail the opening bars of _Danse Macabre_.

"Strange is it not, that the belle of the ball remains unattended?" The folds of the cloak shifted as the person, creature, or imaginary figment crossed their arms. The action revealed a splash of colour; deep purple velvet hemmed in bloody red.

"No. It's to expected. Not to mention that even in a dream I have a fatal sense of coordination."

Again laughter rippled beside her, warm and pleasant and unfamiliar.

"So it's self-imposed exile then?"

"I guess so. As much as a narcissistic, twerpish fae digging about uninvited in my brain will allow."

A pause from the mystery entity. "That seems equitable," it mused.

"You think?" Sarah held the mask to her eyes, calmly retying its black ribbons behind her head. "Originally I was planning to conjure several male underwear models, all in various states of undress, and have my way with them in the coat room. After all, I reasoned, being trapped within one's own head should not be without certain benefits."

Beside her, the figure drew taller, shoulders set into a hard line. Sarah eyed it sideways with a trace of a smirk, sighing theatrically as she stepped towards the dance floor.

"But perhaps it's for the best. I wouldn't have heard this beautiful music had I been smothered with coats and tanned pectoral muscles."

"How... generous."

Sarah smiled. "Quite. Please excuse me." She took another step forwards, intending to cross the room again, to find a mirror in the midst of this lunacy and leave. She did not want to be forced into having life-altering revelations. Not on someone else's terms. Yet a hand disconcertingly real and solid captured her wrist, pulling her backwards into the cloak's many folds. Against the nape of her neck, warm breath set her skin to goose-flesh.

"Are you always this succinct? Or is it only when you're pretending to be lucid?" Just behind her ear, lips burnt a firery brand.

"Are you always this jealous?" Sarah breathed.

The lips pulled away, surprised. "Pardon?"

"Jealous." Sarah turned, the fingers of her free hand raising the stranger's chin, yellow candlelight banishing all concealments. "Do I have to fabricate trysts every time I need you to stop and actually _listen_ to me?"

Jareth blinked. "I'm not following. And how did you know it was me?"

Sarah tugged at a lock of impossibly blonde hair. "Hidden face, thrown voice, not to mention you still seem as colour-blind as a retriever." Cringing, she broke off a loose red thread from Jareth's collar. It fell lightly, disappearing before reaching the floor.

Amazing, she thought, how the Goblin King could appear so shabbily dressed in a dream. Her dream. Straightening his collar, Sarah briefly wondered if she had made him like that, on purpose.

"You're being very unfair," Jareth huffed, wrenching the cowl from his head. "Why must you- look, stop that. It's _supposed_ to be tied like that. Dishevelled debonair, etcetera."

Ignoring his protests, Sarah re-knotted an indigo gypsy-style scarf woven through with tiny stars. "Don't talk to me about fair. You never gave me a choice!" She stressed the last word loudly, tightening the scarf's knot just a little more than was necessary.

Coughing delicately, Jareth caught both of her hands in his and removed them from his neck. Of course Sarah _would _dream of attempted murder.

"About what?"

Sarah tipped her head back over her shoulder, gesturing to ballroom. "This." She looked down at her dress, a fantastic confection of sewn-together shadows. "This. You never once asked me if I wanted any of it."

Jareth raised both eyebrows in surprise. "Would you have stayed longer if I had?"

"Maybe. That's the nice thing about free will. Choices can lead you either way. But understand this: if you ever try making my decisions for me again, I don't care about the likelihood of brain damage, I'm eating a whole basketful of hallucinogenic fruit and filling this place to the roof with naked soccer players."

Jareth made a noise of derision better placed with a back-alley drinking den, stepping around Sarah in time to a lonely violin on the far side of the room.

To give him credit Sarah later thought he had been very crafty about the whole affair. She was scarcely aware they had begun dancing, so surreptitiously did he move.

Mollified, she allowed herself to be drawn closer, intrigued by nonchalant fingers wandering up her spine.

"Free will..." Jareth muttered, voice reverberating against Sarah's cheek. "Believe me love, Sartre was a twat."

**a/n: Please believe I have nothing against Sartre, only Jareth seems to hold favour more with determinism. One action leads to another, with pre-ordained consequences, free will is only an illusion, etc., etc. What's the bet he's used that to try and get into Sarah's pants and failed? :D Talk about bitter.**

**Hope you've all enjoyed reading Chapter Twenty-One! I like to think Sarah can be more... candid when she's dreaming. Please share your thoughts in a review! Before next semester begins and I transmute into a raving lunatic screeching about insensible academic jargon, I hope to settle down and stockpile some more chapters. **

**Cheers to hope, ladies and gents! :D**


	22. Regarding Carnivorous Hats

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Two: Regarding Carnivorous Hats **

They did not feel her passing. Wandering through this plane of intangibility, they might have seen more of her than anyone else in the collective universe; living or dead. But they did not see her. Upon the intricately patterned ballroom floor, a shadow cast in full candlelight went unnoticed.

Even in argument, the girl and her fae were utterly absorbed by one another. The Dream Spinner felt what she thought to be mild amusement. It was difficult to reference the sensation against a limited emotive catalogue. She'd only had one or two very rare occasions when she attempted to understand the logic of dream-colours. Not because her work required it of her, but because she genuinely wanted to.

Despite her lack of personal experience, the Spinner could plainly see who belonged to whom. An ancient creature of incredible power and malevolence had been inexplicably brought to heel by an ordinary girl. She was not more intelligent, nor more pretty than others of her age. She held secret certain fears; for her family, herself... and him. They flashed beneath the calm measure of her voice, in her warm hands straightening his collar.

Jareth seemed equally unaware of his enslavement, the price of engaging the Spinner to meddle in Sarah's dreams. Indulgently, he allowed the girl to fuss over his clothing, watching her carefully as she broke away a loose red thread and cast it to the floor. Neither party observed that the thread failed to land. Instead it chose to float haphazardly about the ballroom, like a musically appreciative jellyfish. Following an almost incident with a cut-crystal punch bowl, a leaping candle-flame, and an elegant lady's hat that was in fact, not a hat at all, but something feathered and beady-eyed with lots of teeth, the thread was snatched from the air by a disembodied hand.

_That's enough excitement for evening, my pet. _Reverently, the Spinner wound the thread and stowed it securely within the folds of her robe. Upon returning to the Labyrinth's corporeal plane she would tease apart the strands, weaving this crimson bloody red into the fantastic, particoloured dreamings of the Goblin King and his Champion. No matter when or where they went, one would now forever after dream of the other. Low cello notes rolled across the room, murmuring of exploding stars and love untouched by death.

_Time has only just begun for you._

…_..._

"Did you know that you talk in your sleep?"

Blearily, Sarah swatted away the fingers tweaking her ear and pulled the bed-clothes over her head. She did not try to understand how she had materialised once again in Jareth's bed, but rather suspected a certain amount of glitter and evaporation magic was involved.

"I do not. Go away. Retrospectively, if at all possible."

Jareth sat on the edge of the bed and leaned down to murmur in Sarah's tightly blanketed ear. "You wound my fragile little heart, dearest."

The lump beneath the bed-clothes made a disbelieving sound, wriggling down to make a cosier nest beside the small of Jareth's back.

"Well if I do, that makes you an eavesdropper. You should sit in an oubliette for the rest of the morning and think about the error of your ways."

Jareth patted the lump. "Were I to do that, I should be there forever and always. And that's only counting my repenting for the little errors- like forgetting to wipe my shoes on the doormat."

"Good."

"Would you come and visit me in my oubliette?"

"Maybe."

"Would you bring me tea?"

"Possibly."

"Biscuits too? No one's ever brought me biscuits of their own volition before. Perhaps they hadn't thought to poison them in order to get rid of me."

"Now there's an idea. I'll consult with the apothecary as soon as I get up."

Laughing, Jareth curled around the lump and draped his arms over it. "Would you cry for me if I died from poisoned biscuits Sarah?" he said softly. "Would your eyes go red and your face all splotchy? Would you miss me terribly?"

The lump went very still. "... I... I was going to say yes, but you've torn it with your inane idiocy."

Surprised, Jareth's face broke into a slow grin. "Then I shall die a happy idiot."

"You forgot the poison part."

"Naturally. A dead, foam-flecked, blue-tinged, yet inordinately happy idiot." Stretching out a hand, he pulled down the edge of the covers, spilling hazy afternoon light into Sarah's warm nest. "Yet before I nobly perish, I should like to ask you something."

Sarah yawned, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of a palm. "You've already asked me at least fifty somethings this morning." She sneezed in the light, wishing she could roll over and go back to sleep for a few more hours, face buried in Jareth's shoulder. There was a weightiness to his proposition she didn't like- she wasn't awake enough yet to deal with the rising trepidation that set her stomach churning.

"It's afternoon," Jareth corrected. "You slept away the morning." Ignoring Sarah's insulting mutter, he swept back the stray trendrils of her hair and looked at her severely. "So dearest," he said grimly, "What do you want to do today?"

With infinite relief, Sarah's lips curled in a little smile. "That's all?"

Jareth looked affronted. "_That's all? s_he asks? Considering I can rearrange blinking time and space to suit _your _whims, I should think that's a very generous offer."

"It is. Thank-you." Rolling over, she lightly touched Jareth's cheek, smile warming her eyes. It sent the Goblin King into a kind of shocked stupor; she never normally initiated this kind of contact.

Yet after an interminable age, he recollected his senses enough to string together a couple of words. "For what?"

"Asking me. You're trying to do things differently, even though it runs against the grain. I can see that. I might even go so far as to say I like it." Before Jareth's brain could once again screech to a halt, she levered herself up on her elbows. "I know what I want to do today," she said brightly. "No Labyrinth, no spells, no crushing rebel chicken militia. I want to do something immeasurably more dangerous."

"Oh?" Jareth sat up, interest piqued. "And what might that be?"

Sarah's smile grew wicked. "I'm going to teach you how to bake biscuits," she said.

**a/n: Despite retaining the deathly pallor and speech impediment of a zombie, I have happily crawled away alive from this semester. There may have been a small incident involving burning torches and pitchforks, but we won't go into that here...**

**Regardless, I have staggered into the bright, blistering sunlight with a fluffy new chapter of G.K. clutched in my feeble hands! **

**I hope you've all enjoyed reading this- I had altogether too much fun writing it. Please share your thoughts in a review! :3 As I am weaned from eating human brains and drinking syrupy-sludge that once may have been coffee, I will be working towards more regular updates.**

**Providing the villagers don't find me first. :D**


	23. The Many & Varied Uses of Toasting Forks

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Three: The Many and Varied Uses of Toasting Forks**

"Flour into the bowl, and not on your clothes, if you please." Removing the measuring cup from Jareth's hands, Sarah held it beneath the edge of a wide stone bench and briskly swept her hand across the mess. Before Jareth could arrange his face into a searing scowl, she emptied the cup back into the bowl and said quickly, "But you're doing a grand job of things all the same."

Beating clouds of coarsely milled, yet unmistakably purple flour from his jacket sleeves, Jareth descended into raking coughs. "You're a filthy liar," he choked.

Cracking thoroughly normal chicken eggs into the flour, Sarah gave a little half-curtsey before throwing the shells into the burning embers of the lit oven nearby.

"Not so. I'm an immaculate liar. The secret is to not wear your ingredients."

Arching an eyebrow, Jareth retreated to a wicker chair next to the oven. It had made the kitchen warmer, certainly, in the cool air of gathering night. But it was Sarah who made it feel distinctly less empty. She was happy. She was relaxed. Fetching an earthen jar of honey from a low shelf she moved as if she knew everything and everyone inside this little room. She did not even seem to mind scraping off several small faeries that had become trapped around the sticky jar rim. The alive ones were grateful at least. They staggered across the bench-top in wild zig-zags, tracking purple flour across a sheaf of handwritten recipes. Worn, faded, burnt, and stained with the smears of a thousand dinners, these were written in a dimly remembered, archaic language. Several appeared to have been inked onto some kind of leathery skin.

But Sarah had no cause to thumb through the grisly leavings of cooks past. Gently herding faeries away from her work space, she pulled the dough from the bowl and set to kneading it with nimble fingers.

"You're a soft touch with those glittery insects." Jareth picked up a brass toasting fork and stirred the embers, lest he be accused of doing nothing. "If you had half a brain you'd squash them flat. Little buggers will bite you as soon as look at you."

"Don't talk rubbish," said Sarah, expertly twisting coils of dough into rings and setting them out on sheets of dark grey slate. "What harm did-" breaking off, she yelped a dockside curse and clapped a hand to her ear, furiously beating at the air above her head with the other.

Jareth rolled his eyes and sighed loudly. "Of course you are right my King," he said, faultlessly mimicking Sarah's crisp tones, "but as you can see, I'm rather busy disregarding common-sense right now. What was that? Oh yes, I know there's bits of uncooked biscuit through my hair, and my futile flailing is only worsening the situation. I'm sure next time I'll-"

"Either help or shut up, just pick one!"

Standing, Jareth gripped the toasting fork with implacable determination. "Stay absolutely still," he said, calculating distances with a steely eye. There was a moment of quiet, save the crackling fire and erratic, smug wing-beats overhead. In a flash, Jareth lashed out with his fork, connecting with a loud _thunk_ and a tiny squeal.

Tucking the makeshift weapon beneath an arm, he prised Sarah's hand away from her head and made _tut-tut _noises. "Luckily for you I think you'll live," he said, pecking a kiss on her injured ear and turning away before he saw her flush crimson.

"Was all that really necessary?" she muttered.

Thinking Sarah was referring to the rather lax punishment, Jareth nodded to himself. "Yes... you're quite right. Very understated. Most irregular..." Quickly crossing to the other side of the kitchen, he tracked down the rogue vermin (lying senseless on the floor beside a huge glass jar of live beetles), and stomped on it for good measure.

"Let that be a lesson to the rest of you tinker-twerps," he growled, using the fork to scrape a luminescent orange goo from the sole of his boot. "Here, let me take those. Get the door, would you?"

Sarah relinquished the slates and went to find a dry cloth to open the hot oven. "You're being very helpful," she observed, with the tiniest mote of suspicion,"... one to each shelf would be best... it's strange." Swinging the door shut, she pulled across the heavy metal latch and sat on her heels, savouring radiant warmth now sinking into her clothing.

"Perhaps I'm just a good student. Though you forget I have a vested interest in these biscuits. Amongst other things." His voice was light and teasing as he inclined his head toward Sarah, the aristocratic gesture rendered ridiculous by purple flour plastered across one side of his face. "How long until they're ready?"

Dodging a poking from the toasting fork, Sarah rose to her feet and began to scrub her hands clean in a bucket of soapy water on one end of the bench. "Thirty minutes or so," she said, flicking suds at Jareth. "Or until smoke starts pouring out of the oven. Whichever comes first."

"Excellent. That should give us enough time."

Drying her hands on the hem of her inherited shirt, Sarah grimaced.

"Go on," Jareth prodded, sitting down on the flagstones with his back to the oven door. "Ask. You're dying to."

"Nope. I don't think I am."

"Clearly a misdiagnosis." Steepling his fingers, Jareth nodded to the chair, motioning for Sarah to sit down. His eyes crinkled at something half-remembered, pleasantly surprising himself. "I believe I shall tell you a story. Of endings. Beginnings. Feathers and the moon."

With each word, goblins crept into the kitchen- slinking out of cupboards and edging around the partially closed door. To hear their King tell a rare tale, it was worth risking a bogging for interrupting time spent with the Lady. They hardly dared to breathe as they jostled for space on the crowded floor. Following a brief scuffle the lucky ones managed to secure spots beneath Sarah's chair, safe from any pending eruption of royal ire.

Feeling magnanimous, Jareth spread his hands wide and motioned for silence. Partial to theatrics, he could manipulate a captive audience like a musician's finely tuned violin. Yet one sour note and he would very likely smash the thing to pieces over the nearest head.

"Will there be magic?" asked Sarah, smiling down at two very small goblins perched on the tops of her borrowed socks. She wriggled her toes a little, deliberately trying to provoke a giggle.

"It wouldn't be much of a story without it." Jareth shot the youngsters a warning look, all but _daring _them to make a sound. A quick cuff from their elders and they settled down remorsefully, clutching the legs of Sarah's jeans in a manner that suggested they would be tattling to her later.

"How do these things usually start?" Stretching forward and whispering a forgotten word, Jareth transformed the dull stones into wide mirror- brighter than molten silver. "Ah yes," he murmured, dipping fingers through the liquid floor.

"Many, many years ago, before the age of man..."

**a/n: As I am already a day late in posting this chapter, Jareth's story will keep for later (much like that piece of pizza forming a democratic society in the the back of the fridge). I hope you've all enjoyed this instalment, and as ever, I'd love to know your thoughts in a review! **

**Thanks also to all the new readers (and splendid regulars) who left such encouraging comments. I wish you all rainbows for breakfast! (They might be a little chewy what with the ground-up leprechauns through them, but try not to think about. If you do, pretend it's extra fibre).**

**Enjoy your week m'lovelies! Cheers. :D**


	24. Glorious Days of Snot Nosed Youth

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Four: Glorious Days of Snot-Nosed Youth**

"Many, many years ago, before the age of man, creatures of the Underground walked freely upon the earth. As soon as dusk descended, they clambered out from their dank caverns and felt warm soil beneath their feet, the secrets from Below drawn up through the hungry roots of ancient trees." Jareth paused, fingertips stretching out through the floor to brush the miniature crown of a creaking oak.

"There was many of my kind then. Some knew the language of rivers and streams; often spending entire evenings waist-deep in rushing water with eels twined around their ankles. Others could speak to birds and beasts; in the days when such things were both fiercely wild and terribly cunning. Before they learnt to fear man with his sharpened sticks and blinding fire.

Not many fae knew how to talk to trees. Not only extraordinarily difficult, it's also rather vexing. The dialects change all the time you understand. Not just across different species, or even among a number of the same family. No, a tree will keep its secrets because the language changes _every season. _Imagine, if you will, that each leaf blowing in the wind represents a word or phrase. As each word is lost to the clutches of winter, the tree begins to forget itself. Spring leaves do not have the old memories of roots or branches, and so must invent new words for themselves.

One year in early spring, a light frost still glittering on the grass, I began to cultivate the friendship of an oak's tender new leaves. They were young and very impressionable. They did not listen to the warnings almost shouted by older parts of the tree. Indeed, they took almost spiteful pleasure in disobedience, whispering to me softly in conspiratorial rustlings as the great oak's heart wept.

In the giddy freedom of friendship, those leaves told many things. How to See. How to Blind. The true name of the earth and the weakness within every storm cloud. As the summer nights grew hot and oppressive- the mosquitoes making a bothersome nuisance of themselves, my delightful companions let slip a most delicious morsel of information.

They knew where the moon hid her cloak of feathers.

On dark nights when the stars are looking elsewhere, the moon will sometimes pull her cloak about her shoulders and go a-wandering. We had all seen her in those woods- a magnificent white owl cutting a silent path through the gloaming. She never tired, never took prey. Some believed that to taste blood made from the earth would tie her to it forever. Others thought this was poppycock, the result of romantic claptrap, because in truth mice are surprisingly palatable... particularly those little stripey ones with bobblely-things on the tails... blast. Where was I?"

"The cloak?" Sarah prodded, surreptitiously transferring her small sock goblins to her knees where they might have a better view of the mirrored floor.

"Oh yes," said Jareth absently. "Thanks, love." The audience broke out into little murmurs, watching as a pale-skinned woman hid a bundle of feathers within a deep tree hollow. Coughing awkwardly, Sarah put a hand each in front of the goblins' eyes. The woman in the floor clearly naked. Only the fall of her long silver hair partially concealed her from view. Climbing down from the tree she seemed to linger, if only for a moment. A deep breath, three steps forward, and she was swallowed up by the blackness, lost to Sight on every plane.

"Fae are blessed with many gifts. Intelligence. Attractiveness. The ability to tell apart a salad fork and a dessert fork at fifty paces. Yet none can take the form of animal. The transmutation magick is complicated and fiddly. Not to mention it hurts like a red-hot poker is being shoved up every orifice in your body. But to change so simply!"

Jareth frowned at a much younger version of himself swinging lightly into the lower branches of the moon's tree. "That kind of power is old. Too old to even be called magick proper. In my glorious days of snot-nosed youth, I thought this segregation terribly unfair. Why should I have to slog through life on two shapely- yet rather inconvenient legs, when I could be skimming across the tree-tops as easy as winking?"

The image in the floor wavered. A small, grubby-looking Jareth was sitting in a fork of the great tree, holding the cloak in front of him. From the greedy look in his eyes it might have been made of diamonds and silver filigree, not feathers that looked frayed and quite frankly, smelt musty.

"I knew why the exact moment _after _I had put it on. Fae aren't designed for that kind of rapid change- not at first. It was all so sudden and seamless that I lost my bearings and fell. Hard. You'd think a faery-tale forest carpeted with thick grass and pretty little wild-flowers would make for a softer landing, wouldn't you? Not only would you be wrong, but all those flowers would be laughing hysterics as they soaked up the blood from your imbecilic head.

The others found me just before dawn. Twisted ankle, fractured arm and most of the small, tender bones in one hand broken like toothpicks. They knew what I had done- the cloak came loose when I fell and now lay crushed beneath me. They knew... and were absolutely _livid_. Not only had the few rules we lived by been so brazenly flouted, they were carelessly ground into a fine paste of non-existence.

Ignoring pleas for clemency, hands seized my uninjured leg and dragged me through the woods. Words like _condemnable _and _requital _were bandied about as my head struck a myriad of sharp rocks peppering the entrance of a deep cavern.

That they hadn't left me to slowly perish where I had fallen spoke volumes. Perhaps that would have been kinder." Jareth leant forward, staring as though he would pull himself out of the floor, away from the horror of what came next.

"They threw me against a huge stalagmite. My own kin bound my hands and waist around it, so I faced away from them, my back exposed. I knew what would happen... But with most things, knowing doesn't help to make it any easier. The sound came before the pain-a roaring crack that sheared the dull throb of my broken bones in two. A sudden warmth and my shirt felt wet. This surprised me. Like most young things I thought myself infallible- quite above the indignity of something so peasant-like as _bleeding._

Yet bleed I did. Ten licks of the lash and banishment Underground." Jareth made a quiet noise of amusement. "It sounds so simple said like that. I suppose it was in a way. They didn't mess about in those days."

A goblin by Sarah's foot squealed with excitement. "Then Kingy-King come live with us!"

"It's 'Your Majesty' or a bogging you scurrilous rip-scut." Jareth's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Chose."

The goblin blanched and began to tremble. "Yer... Mag... Meg... Meg-guesty?"

"Better. Unless you'd like to spend the next few thousand years preserved in soft peat I would advise you to keep your trap shut when I am talking." Rubbing his temples in a harassed sort of way, Jareth glowered at the chastised goblin. "A pox on you and yours," he muttured. "I've lost track again."

As he stood, the floor bubbled briefly- subsiding into the dull grey flagstones of before. Disappointed whines filled the kitchen, fading only when Jareth threatened them with his toasting fork.

"Any more of that and it'll be an oubliette for the lot of you." Unlatching the oven door, Jareth turned and smirked devilishly. "Filled with large, venomous spiders selling encyclopaedias," he said.

Shrieks erupted on all sides as a mad stampede to evacuate the kitchen ensued. Sighing, Sarah patted two quivering lumps in the pockets of her jeans and lurched to her feet, throwing Jareth a cloth for handling the hot slates.

"That was certainly... effective," she said.

"Thank-you."

"It wasn't a compliment."

"No? Well. Thank-you for your observation dripping with praise then."

Gently shouldering Jareth out of the way, Sarah gave the cooling biscuits an experimental tap. "I think these have turned out quite nicely. Here Kingy-King, hold out your hands." Dodging Jareth's scowl with contrived innocence, Sarah deposited several soft biscuits into his open palms shooed him to the doorway leading out into the castle gardens. "Now you sit there on the steps like a good little domesticated monarch while I find some tea for us to drink."

Listening to the soft rattle of china and the _clunk_ of a kettle set to boil, Jareth smoothed his bristling indignation. "You're not beyond a bogging either you know," he called. "Sympathising with the lesser orders sounds awfully similar to democracy. From there it's just a short hop-skip to mutiny... Then there'll be another Poultry Uprising and we'll have to sell all the silverware just to have eggs on toast."

Sliding across the steps, he accepted a steaming cup from Sarah and offered her a warm biscuit when she sat down.

"Did that really- no. I don't want to know. Consider myself warned." Blowing across her own tea-cup, Sarah took a cautious sip. "I hope you like it," she said. "It's honey and lemon. Or honey and something-undentifiable-that-smells-a-lemon. I tried not to look at it too closely. I think it was staring."

"It never bodes well to make eye-contact with your food," agreed Jareth, slurping his tea and glancing at Sarah as she nibbled a biscuit. "The verdict?" he asked.

"Purple."

"Nonsense. Unless you partial to masticating rainbows, which I doubt, colours have no taste."

"Can't say I'm in the habit. Try one. You'll see."

A rapid crunching filled the doorway.

"Good grief," Jareth spluttered.

"Purple?"

"Very. In a good, purple-y way."

Looking out into the still gardens, Sarah drummed tentative fingers against her cup. "About your story," she broached. "The ending..."

Jareth's face flashed in irritation as a biscuit he was dipping in tea disintegrated. "What? Oh. Well, obviously it would've been far more impressive had I not been pre-empted by an upstart flippety-gibbet."

Trying to stop fidgeting, Sarah picked her next words carefully. "That's not what I meant," she said. "I only wondered... if you missed them. Your family. It must have been hard, sent away in disgrace like that."

Balancing the last biscuit on Sarah's knee, Jareth stretched his long legs to the bottom of the steps and breathed a sigh of contentment. "It was a long time ago," he said gently. "Almost all of them are gone now anyway."

"Gone? Where?"

Jareth drained his cup and threw the dregs on a nearby flowerbed. "Wherever it is when we're not here," he said ambigiously.

"Do you mean- _dead_?" Sarah gasped the last word, instantly appalled by her insensitivity.

Jareth shrugged. "Perhaps," he said. 'I shouldn't mind if they were. They were lousy gift-givers and nearly everyone smelt of cabbage." He smiled at Sarah's shocked expression. "I've been called many things love, but nostalgic isn't one of them. Besides," he added merrily, "I got the best of them in the end." From the top of his boot Jareth drew something white and rumpled.

Sarah stared, uncomprehending. "A feather?"

"Not _a _feather. _The _feather." He paused, waiting for Sarah's eyes to light in recognition.

"From the cloak?"

Jareth grinned. "The very same. Managed to filch one just before they grabbed me. It was years before I could work out how to change with just a solitary feather. The not-magick won't work well in harness with other spells and bindings. Not in the beginning. Almost drove me to lunacy more than once."

"Almost?"

"I might have spent some months wearing a tea-cosy as a hat, but thankfully, that's past. You're now in the resplendent company of the only transmuting fae within several thousand leagues in any direction."

"Imagine my luck," Sarah muttered, soft snores emanating from her pockets.

A theatrical groan and Jareth levered himself upright, rubbing his back in places where it had rested on the steps. "All this talk of flapping about has made me hungry," he said. "I think I'll go and nab a bat for supper. Would you like one?"

Laughing at Sarah's alarmed features, Jareth stepped out towards the dim night air. "And they say travel broadens the mind," he scoffed. "If you get tired, feel free to mosey your little sleepy head off to bed. It's hard to say how digestible the bats are feeling tonight."

Turning in a rush of wind and rippling feathers, Jareth's lips quirked. "In any case, I'll come along later to tuck you in and kiss you goodnight." Double meaning made the words lie thick and heavy. Falling backwards, a sudden updraft caught his newly transmuted wings, silently tearing the Goblin King away from garden and the girl sitting on the stone steps, washed in yellow firelight.

The girl who was now struggling to contain a roaring panic burning through her chest. Hugging her knees to her forehead, Sarah tried desperately to restore a sense of calm. Counting her breaths. Silently reciting Kipling. Quadratic equations. Nothing worked.

Feeling her nails dig through to the skin beneath her jeans, she knew. But as Jareth himself had said a lifetime ago, knowing doesn't always help to make things easier.

"I have to leave," she whispered, voice cracking.

**a/n: Despite my best efforts, humorous things keep intruding upon my writing-time. The latest includes finding brass bands belting out Christmas carols in strange places, and vainly trying to deter a large black-and-white cat from stealing fragile glass Christmas ornaments (he was given a plastic bauble to play with when I was dressing the tree, but wasn't fooled by the substitution).**

**As always, I hope you've had fun with this latest chapter. Please feel free to share your thoughts in a review! I rather liked the sense of impending horror-awkward. :D Things will certainly become... interesting.**

**Thanks also to everyone who has taken an interest in G.K. or left a comment since the last update. I really enjoyed reading through all of your opinions and suggestions!**

**Cheerio for the mo'. :D**


	25. Presenting Jam in Brilliant Technicolour

**Goblin Knot **

**Chapter Twenty-Five: Presenting Jam in Brilliant Technicolour**

More blood. Too much. Not enough. Sarah felt her face burn then pale as her brain swam in delightful soup of warm hysteria. Not the kind that warrants medication, but enough that nice people would move away from her if they saw her sitting in a crowded bus. It had something to with the way she buried her hands wretchedly in her hair, fingers close against the scalp, as though she would force a shroud of cold sweat to creep ashamedly back into her skin.

The air had lost its perfume and the night gardens their charm. Sarah wanted to go home and carry on playing make-believe, pretend she was a worldly, charismatic adult as she ordered a mathematically impossible coffee from the local university's cafe. To giggle with her classmates over a suggestive note written on a surreptitiously placed napkin. To be comfortably normal. To be happy with her generic, plastic-wrapped _normalcy. _

Gathering up empty tea-cups from the step, Sarah fled into the tiny kitchen, pulling the safety of the stone walls tight around her shoulders. At once her anxiety contracted, winding and tangling, becoming a tightly knotted ball deep within her chest. Faery-tales tend not to mention what happens _after _the rescues, the deadly duels, the casual trotting-away-into-the-sunset-on-a-beautiful-white-horse. Such things wink slyly, languidly, from between silky sheets of subtext. Retrieving a candle from the cutlery drawer (which was brimming with tapers, buttons and wheels of furry green cheese, yet defiantly devoid of any useful eating utensils), Sarah carefully set the wick burning, shielding its smoky light as she hurried along the narrow twisting corridors leading away from the kitchen.

She was not ashamed of her body. Not exactly. Just... unsure of it. As though long ago her mind had given up trying to read the instruction manual. That someone else had taken such an obvious interest in the pleasures it could afford was thrilling and terrifying in equal measures. Wasn't this what she had wanted? The sinuous, twining resolution to so many years of denied feelings and hastily worded rejections. Could she bear to admit that she had wronged herself by creating a crystalline bubble of complacency? Would her thoughts and idiosyncrasies, the iridescent particles which defined her in world as Sarah Williams, would they too be consumed along with her body?

She shrank from the noise and light thrown from the throne room into the corridor. A riotous goblin party, complete with off-key singing, was in full-swing- permissible now the King was in such peculiarly good temper. What she wouldn't give to be one of their number now happy in mindless, mildly drunken ignorance.

Slipping between shadows, the cold slate beneath her feet gave way to rough, buttery sandstone and stairs which wound sideways and upways, in little fits of ziz-zags.

Higher.

She had to climb higher.

To the twisted mess of stairs and landings, glued together by a blatant misuse of gravity.

Sarah slowed her pace, keeping a hand on the curving wall to guide her. Though she felt a burning need to hurry, to bolt and fall and bruise and bleed in a fine display of distressing martyrdom, logic disguised as insanity cosied up beside her flittering thoughts, friendly and reassuring as a delightfully mad grandfather in a threadbare carpet-slippers. To run faster, she must walk; the way is complex and the sharp edges of the stairs will not forgive wanton clumsiness.

To run, to _walk _away from the castle, she must go further in; only in the King's nest of irrationality could there be an end to all of this. There had to be. She had written her own ending and defied convention before. Why not again? Why not now?

Hadn't she championed self-reliance and determination by defeating the labyrinth? Who other than herself had the damned right to decide how her life should be played out?

Feet heavy, Sarah's grand resolutions cracked and crumbled, falling behind her in a trail of fine black sand.

_Idiot,_ she raged. _Don't you dare pretend to be noble and self-sacrificing. If your guts hadn't already been used to string your wailing, self-pitying violin, you'd march yourself downstairs, wait for Jareth to hack-up an owl-pellet, then lay out your problems in neat and tidy alphabetical order for joint discussion. Isn't that what you spent all this time doing- mashing conversational skills into his fat, glittery head?_

Reaching a low door at the head of a spiralling staircase, Sarah knelt and crawled the rest of the way through on her hands and knees, careful not to overshoot the narrow stone platform and fall through the wide balustrade gaps on the other side. She hadn't much experience with falling _down_, but rather suspected _up_ would be just as painful.

Coughing, her eyes began to sting and water against the sand now rushing from behind in frantic gusts, impatient to wash upwards, down to the floor of another chamber directly overhead.

Weak amber light, the same colour of turning autumn leaves filled the heart of this impossible maze. Without lamps, captured stars, or peasants set a-flame, it seemed to radiate from the very walls themselves- a flood from which the shadows crept into corners and crevices and would not be coaxed.

Creeping forward warily, Sarah's outstretched hands found and latched onto one of the many small, crumbling pillars beneath a rotting wooden handrail. Thousands of years ago, when the goblins first found this place, the railings were strong and even- the sharp yellow teeth of a many-mawed monster. Inevitably, time ground them down, dispelling a keen taste for mischief that could quite easily pitch a young woman forward, send her hurtling through space to become an aesthetically pleasing (and regrettably, somewhat _dead_) rearrangement of limbs.

Embarrassed surprise gave way to smug satisfaction as the stonework watched Sarah wrap herself miserably around the relative safety of the decaying railing. Of course. She was not leaving this patch-worked reality in shredded tatters because she could not.

She did not remember how.

Before, she had worked a something, a _not-magick. _Looking to her toddling brother, wide-eyed and trusting in his dusty pyjamas, she was overcome by incomprehensible, desperate, necessity. She was taking him home. Together they would finger-paint, blow bubbles, and look at frogs in the garden. He was not a play-thing to be kept by goblins, to be inspected, prodded, or accidentally broken. He belonged to no-one but himself and his real, human family. To Sarah.

The pretty little madwoman currently willing herself to be calm. As quiet and still as-

"_Ow!" _

a pebble in a stream. Calm and still and-

"OW!" piped a muffled squeak. "Please to stop squishin'! We snot blackberries for jams!"

Startled, Sarah glanced down, then groaned. The goblin children. Of course. One sound asleep in each pocket, she had neglected to return them to the flailing arms of their unwilling brethren.

Clambering out from her jeans, they stood on her knees, staring up at her pale face with calculated impudence.

"You broked my thingumywhatsit," said the other accusingly, indicating a limp tail trailing behind it- a whip-like tapering of minute green scales.

"Jams would fixies," countered the first. "A _whole _pot," throwing its arms wide, it gasped, "_this _big." Pausing a moment, it added, "Has to be reds though. With seedys. Seedys make thingumywhatsits better."

Sarah frowned, believing both diagnosis and remedy to be highly suspect. "I'm terribly sorry," she said, synthetically sympathetic, "but I haven't any to give you."

"Not reds?" the tailed goblin's voice quavered pathetically.

"No."

"Not black?"

"No. Not green, not orange, or any other colour in-between."

The tailed goblin heaved a sigh and shimmied up Sarah's hair- quite forgetting to feign crippling injury in its hurry to stand on her head. "Where _is _we?" it wondered loudly.

On Sarah's knee, the other waved a small hand with webbed fingers. "Ooo- me! Me! I know," it shouted. Capturing the attention of both Sarah and its friend, it continued prissily, "We's in the _if-I-ever-catch-you-mucking-about-in-here...so-much-as-a-__**toe**__...Oberon-help-me-I'll-stake-you-to-the-ground-and-leave-you-to-be-savaged-by-horrible-wild-chickens._" Pride at such a lengthy repetition fell along with its grin. Terrible realisation dawned. Quick as winking, it dove into Sarah's pocket, pulling a folded handkerchief over its trembling body.

"What is it?" asked Sarah, alarmed by her headgear's sudden abseil down her hair, its frantic scrabbling to hide behind the thicker tresses beside her neck. "What's wrong?"

The echo of running feet reverberated through the maze. The sound was hard; the feet were shod. The footsteps far-apart; the runner was tall. No scuffling or sliding, they pounded ever-closer. A grim beating that would entreat even the dead to open their doors.

"Trouble," whispered a tiny voice below her ear. "Big, big, trouble."

**a/n: At last! I have tunnelled my way out from beneath my lovely little rock to write a new chapter!**

**Academia has decided to be a terrible prat lately. It stole my play-lunch, broke my crayons, and would not say sorry. Yet for all that, I still hold out it secretly wants to befriend me- that my degree and I shall one day skip merrily into the sunset. **

**I hope you've all enjoyed reading this chapter, and if you've the inclination, please share your thoughts! **

**Cheerio, pip-pip!**

**PS. VicWit: Belated, belated congratulations on becoming a mother! Hope you're both doing famously (avoid throwing casual wishes about the nursery though... just in case... ) :D**


	26. The Flippancy of Frogs

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Six: The Flippancy of Frogs**

Bats are accomplished fliers. The smallest move faster than the eye can follow, taking moths on the wing and flying into the hair of small children to amuse themselves- a unique style of animal _shadenfraude_ that no parent will ever admit to knowing about, no matter how patiently explained to them by their child on the other side of a locked bathroom door.

Yet no amount of frenetic flapping could out-manoeuvre the silent horror which now pursued them. It tore through the startled Underground colony as easily as tissue-paper, scattering bats in every direction so that the very air became a churning mass of confusion and desperation. In the resulting chaos, supper most obligingly flew into Jareth's open talons, where it was then dispatched with polite efficiency.

Perching on a broken stalagmite, Jareth clicked his beak with satisfaction, his head swivelling upwards to stare at the shrieking colony. He was going to shred this bat in front of its former friends and relations, and would enjoy it immensely. Given time, the Goblin King was confident he could teach Sarah to love the hunt as much as he did, to revel in the thrill of the chase and its glorious end.

Swallowing a scrap of something that may have been a wing, Jareth ruffled his feathers and fell to preening his chest. Sarah would be splendid, he knew, daintily dealing out death with a grace all of her own making. Pulling out a beakful of downy fluff, he idly dropped it, watching it fall gently before landing on the filthy cave floor.

With time, he was sure he could instruct Sarah to savour the Underground's innumerable delights, to relish them as much as he did her. All she needed was a little push in the right direction. Launching awkwardly into the air, Jareth swept out of the cave, weaving seamlessly through a dripping forest of ancient stalactites. Beneath the shrill screams of the bats, a keen ear could discern the dull roar of an underground river, buried beneath centuries of mud and guano.

It suddenly occurred to Jareth, in this feathered form, that Sarah might soon enjoy little presents of mice and bats, particularly when she began nesting. The few male owls he had encountered Aboveground were very adamant about this point of etiquette. To the lady owl, nothing is quite so romantic as a low-pitched trill outside her tree hollow, promptly followed by half a dozen dead mice raining down on her head.

Cresting a warm updraught, Jareth's telescopic eyes mapped the ground below with perfect clarity; the dead trees standing sentinel beyond the crumbling edges of the Labyrinth, the startled rabbits darting away through sprawling blackberry thickets, the naked version of his human form swimming backstroke in the Castle's fountain.

Hissing, the owl banked sharply across the garden's neatly trimmed hedges, cloak rippling in place of wings. Instead of his usual landing of elvish delicacy, Jareth met the earth violently, grass burning beneath the soles of his boots. Disgustedly, he stomped over to the fountain, witnessing a particularly impressive tumble-turn in shallow water.

"Oi!" shouted Jareth, seizing a frog from a nearby lily-pad and hurling it at the imposter's face. "Who the flying flip are you?" The frog connected with a wet _squelch,_ before it was delicately peeled off by a hand remarkably similar to Jareth's own. It even had the scar on its wrist from the day he crushed the infamously bloody Poultry Mutiny, three hundred years ago.

Locating another frog, Jareth hurled it with equal venom. "Answer me," he commanded, rage crackling in the air.

Pulling an affronted frog from its ear, the replicae splashed into a sitting position, meeting Jareth's piercing stare with friendly animosity. It could have been Jareth's twin, had Jareth been stretched on rack, beaten with a lead pipe, then left to soak in a laundry sink for a few weeks- until his colour faded and he began to smell a little peculiar.

"...Jellyfish," said the doppelganger, in a high falsetto.

Already loaded with a fresh frog, Jareth wavered. "What?"

"Three jellyfish," expanded the replicae helpfully. Pausing, its distorted impression of Jareth's face frowned, deliberating intently. "Sitting on a rock," it ended, nodding with self-satisfaction.

Feeling the slight weight of the slippery frog in his hand, Jareth flung it over his shoulder and began searching for a heavier projectile. Like a toad.

"Acting demented won't help you escape a bogging," he said flatly. "If anything, it's a prerequisite."

"One fell off," sang the replicae, to the tune of _Three __Blind __Mice._ "Aww... Two jellyfish-"

The song suddenly stopped, not because the words had been forgotten, but because the replicae now found a cantankerous brown toad had been plastered across its mouth. The toad, resenting being pressed (quite literally) into royal service, began to ooze odorous green slime.

"If you open your craw again, I will be forced to remove all of your vital organs and replace them them with salamanders. Which quite frankly is exceedingly rude on your part, when one considers we'd then have a dire amphibian shortage."

Scraping off the toad, the replicae tossed it overhead, into the fountain's upper basin. Slime continued to dribble down an exact copy of Jareth's chin.

"What are you?" said the Goblin King, folding his arms across his chest.

Looking pleased with itself, the replicae did the same.

"Stop that. I demand to know who made you."

The replicae spat slime from its mouth, but then reconsidered speaking. Instead, it gravely raised one hand in a universal signal of contempt, conveying a wish that Jareth become intimately... acquainted with himself.

"I see," said the Goblin King silkily. "Well, as you seem rather apt at this 'swimming' lark, let's see how you fare with bog mud, shall we?" Jareth smiled, making the vast, frozen ice-shelves of the Southern Ocean seem warm and inviting by comparison. "You'll start right at the very bottom, I think. In chains. Without a snorkel."

The replicae stared blankly.

"You wait here like a good chap while I pop inside and find some lovely manacles for you. With charming, rusted spikes on the inside. Doesn't that sound nice?"

The replicae looked far from convinced, but remained where it was.

"That's the ticket, old fellow," cooed Jareth. "I won't be a moment."

Pulling his cloak from his shoulders, he neatly folded it over an arm, resisting an impulse to skip merrily towards the kitchen door. This was going to be a splendid evening. First, a long overdue bogging. Secondly, a wash and change of clothes- principally to remove the smell and taste of bat clinging to his person. Then he'd saunter up silently behind Sarah, slip a wandering hand around her waist, and whisper several suggestive somethings into her ear.

Jareth wasn't stupid. He knew how storybook endings played out- the manicured prince on his pedicured horse snaffles the princess with barely a, "Hello, my name is-". The villain gets bugger all- is banished to the forest or the mountains or the bottom of the deep green sea forever and always. That's of course if he hasn't already been horribly murdered by the prince, who covers up the dirty deed by singing a romantic ballad or two.

Jareth could understand Sarah's wariness of him. For years, she must have thought him cold, unfeeling... villainous. Admittedly, he hadn't helped matters when he threw that snake at her, so long ago. But how was he to know she wouldn't like it? He was raised by goblins, and that was simply what you did when you saw A Girl You Fancied.

Shouldering open the heavy wooden door, Jareth strode into the kitchen and dropped his cloak over the back of a chair. Inside, it was was warm and dark, the fire in the oven burning low. Quiet, too. So very quiet.

Sarah must have gone to bed, Jareth decided. And look, here on the floor- a splattered trail of dripping candle wax. Replicae forgotten, tidy-up postponed, Jareth began to climb the stairs leading to the castle's main living quarters, unbuttoning his coat as he went.

Everything had changed. Sarah knew what he was- oh, he was certain she held no delusions about _that_any more. Arrogant, preening, and vindictive. She saw all of that, and still wanted to make him cups of tea and call him out on his blatant untruths. He had seen her mouth curve sweetly, her sidelong glances when she thought he wasn't looking. Part of her _wanted_ to want him, of that he was certain.

Reaching the landing of his bedchamber, Jareth paused. The wax trail did not vanish beneath the door as he was expecting, but continued steadily up the stairs, spiralling away out of sight.

Jareth's blood burned with cold, vicious fury.

Everything had changed.

Sarah had run away.

**a/n: It will please you to know that no frogs were harmed during the writing of this chapter. I can't say the same for toads though- their union is rubbish at negotiating employment contracts.**

**Did you enjoy Chapter 26? Please share your thoughts! :D**

**It was a nice way to end a long, hard slog through second semester. **

**No more deadlines.**

**No more stress.**

**No more, "Darling, we love you- no, _really_, but don't you think you've had enough coffee?" (I was making into a syrup and pouring it onto cake in a fit of manic genius, but that's rather beside the point). **

**A world in which one can luxuriate in writing and coffee and music is a fine thing indeed.**

**Have a splendid weekend m'lovelies! **

**Cheers. :D**


	27. The Secret To An Excellent Coversation

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Secret To An Excellent Conversation.**

He took the stairs two, three at a time, not looking where he placed his feet, not caring if he fell. Jareth only had eyes for the splattered trail of candle-wax, worming its way into the castle's secret heart- the final maze.

The distant murmurs of goblin noise grew less and less the higher he climbed. Eventually, they fell away altogether, and the echoing thunder of his own feet were all that remained to him. Everything else, all the sentimentality, all the stupid, misplaced, misguided, disgusting romanticism was gone. Burned away in a cold, icy rage.

Everything and nothing had changed. He had been an idiot to think he could ever keep Sarah. Hadn't she made him jump and caper on the ends of his puppet-strings before, a lifetime ago? He did everything she had ever asked of him, and more besides, yet it still wasn't enough. She grew tired of playing with him, of acting out her fantasy, and threw him back in the toy-box, broken and tangled and forgotten. What was so damned different this time?

_This time,_ thought Jareth venomously, _this time I'm not playing by her rules. No soft words. No tender entreaties. I'll be the thrice-damned villain in her blasted book and happily burn for it._

Jareth's shoulder clipped the edge of the wall as the stair twisted sharply. He relished the pain, a real, physical hurt that sharpened his all-consuming anger, an ennobling gash as though cut from an enemy's blade. Nothing had changed. After everything, Sarah had ran from him.

_No more._

Sarah sat and listened, and waited for the end. She knew the clattering footsteps were her end come calling, because nothing in her life ever worked out like it was supposed to. School, family, friends. Even her imagination had become so hopelessly entangled, she had given up trying to unravel it. No longer could Sarah be the feckless child she was, lost to reality in the depths of her books and daydreams. She had tasted goblin fruit grown in Underground soil after all, and had enjoyed it. Yet neither could she step into the role the Goblin King would have her play, the willing lover dressed in wisps of silks, in his arms, in his bed.

How could he ever want her like _that,_ after everything? He had seen her shout and stamp her foot in childish tantrums, watched her unseen, as she fought with her brother. Delighted that she really was callous and cruel enough to wish Toby far away from her, into the hands of the Goblin King, all so that she would not need to share her toys. How could anyone, pauper or king, want her like _that_ after seeing her true nature, obscured with such ugly blemishes?

Sarah sat and listened as the footsteps came closer, growing louder. Something more bleak, more desolate than despair draped itself heavily over her. By now, Jareth would have found his chamber empty, spied the cold hard wax upon the stairs. As much as empirical evidence suggested otherwise, the fae was no fool. He would have known Sarah would run up the stairs, desperately seeking escape in the one place where she felt cool, calm and in control. The one place where something went _right_, the one place where she had tasted victory.

Jareth was coming to have it out with her, she knew.

_Whatever happens, _thought Sarah, _it's no less than I deserve._

The door was small, too small to barrel through at a run, helter-skelter. With great satisfaction, Jareth kicked the door in- splintering the lock and ripping the hinges from the wall. It met the stone floor with a sonorous crash, now only scraps of wood and twisted metal. Jareth was not in the mood to parley with doors, magick or no. Was he not Lord of His Dominion, King of the Goblins, Ruler of the Underground? It was not for him to be shut out in his own castle. All doors and the things behind them belonged to him, by inalienable sovereign right. Jareth was not made to crawl through the passage like those that went before him. The wide stone blocks shrank and trembled, rearranging themselves into a high, vaulted corridor, just to get away from the creature radiating scorching hostility.

Jareth slowed, collecting himself. Each step fell loudly, deliberately. He wanted her to know he was coming for her. He wanted her to be afraid of him. It was no less than he deserved. The darkness of the passage receded, giving way to hazy amber light. The last maze was much as he remembered it; stairs and landings snaking endlessly around themselves- a madman's nightmare. What was different was the girl. Not standing like last time, proud and tall and defiant. She sat between the broken stone railings, looking down at the writhing pit of stairs, close to the edge. So very close. Jareth crushed a feeling of fear.

_Not this time._

"If you're in the market for a nice clean death, I can recommend several highly trained assassins, specialising in poisons and instantly broken vertebrae. Jump, and there is no guarantee that you'll fall where you want to, not here."

Sarah flinched at the sound of Jareth's voice, at the acerbic quality in each syllable, every inflection.

"I wasn't planning to jump," she said. "I just want to go home."

"Have you been mistreated in some way?" Jareth's eyes glittered sharply in the perpetual twilight, one acid green, the other frozen blue.

Sarah looked up as her end advanced steadily towards her, and willed herself not to cry. "Please don't," she begged.

"You will answer me, or I promise you, I shall push you over the edge myself. I ask you again: have you suffered unkindness whilst in my care?"

"No," said Sarah quietly.

"Do my goblins offend you?"

"No."

"Ah, I have the right of it then. My hideous face disgusts you."

Sarah pressed her back into the stone, feeling cornered, wishing the broken railing would reach out and swallow her whole. It did not. Sarah had wasted the last of her wishes, and did not expect to be gifted more. Not now.

"Why are you doing this?" she said.

Jareth's feet stopped half a pace away from her. If he cared to, he could have lashed out a foot and sent her flying, out over the landing's edge to crash somewhere in the maze. But no, even villains must maintain some standards of genteel decorum.

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?" he spat. "The storybook villain, the ogre-esque monster? Have I succeeded? Am I repulsive enough for Miss Sarah Williams and her poxy little book?"

Sarah bit the inside of her cheek. There was nothing else for it, she could feel unshed tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. Rather than give herself over to misery, she fed the sensation to her ravenous, direction-less anger. Jumping up, she shoved Jareth away from her.

"I don't _know _what I want!" she shouted, hands curling into balled fists at her sides. "But that's not good enough for you, is it? Obviously I must be constructing dark and sinister machinations against you to want to be up here, to want to go home. You want to be the villain? Fine. Chain me up in the dungeons, or better yet, throw me in an oubliette lined with spikes!" Sarah could tell her anger was shredding itself into hysteria, but she refused to care. It was clear enough that _he _didn't.

"You ran from me," accused Jareth, "after... everything."

"I was _afraid_, you idiot!" screamed Sarah, connecting her knuckles in a furious punch against his stupid amulet, enough to knock the breath from him, enough to make her fingers bleed. "You trumped-up, horrible bastard!"

Sarah swung out with her other hand, but found it caught in a grip colder and harder than iron.

"That. Hurt." hissed Jareth. "Do it again, and I'll do the same to you."

"Go on then. I dare you to," challenged Sarah, struggling to pull herself away from him, but gaining no ground. She did not like the way Jareth was looking at her. Indeed, she discovered the distance between them was closing disagreeably.

"What?" she growled, hating the silence, the loose buttons on his shirt, his hand grasping hers so tightly, it hurt. Why didn't he hurry up and punish her, drop her back in the Labyrinth outside and loose the Cleaners? What was he waiting for?

"What are you afraid of?" said Jareth, softer than a feather brushing against parchment. When Sarah wouldn't answer him, his took hold of her jaw in his free hand and forced her to look up at him. "Why won't you tell me? Why didn't you try talking to me before this? Speak the truth now: would you honestly have left had you the means to? I'm assuming that's the only reason you're still here- that you lacked the method, rather than the inclination."

Sarah said nothing, ashamed of the wet streaks staining her dirty cheeks.

"Am I wrong?" probed Jareth, pulling her closer towards him still, wrapping an arm around the small of her back. That she hadn't tried to hit him again was more telling than she knew.

"No... yes. I don't know."

"You'll know better hereafter," warned Jareth fiercely, blind fury doused by her spilt tears.

Villain he was, certainly, but that did not mean he had to enjoy a girl, no... a _woman_ crying. It was rather hard to make them stop once they started, not to mention messy.

"How can I help you if you don't talk to me?" As he spoke, Jareth watched a perfect, crystalline tear-drop course down her face. She was so close, he could smell her; sweat and honey and fear. So close, he could simply lean down and kiss the tear from the corner of her mouth.

So he did.

Never, _never_, had anything salty tasted so sweet.

"I... I don't know where to begin," breathed Sarah, electrified at that single point of contact. "There's too much to tell."

Jareth smiled, not unkindly.

"I'll give you a clue," he said, tongue tracing the seam of her lips, and meeting no resistance. "It starts... by opening your mouth."

**a/n: Shhh, can you hear it? Not invading dolphins, but fan-squee. Wonderful, wonderful squee. **

**I hope you've all enjoyed this chapter! You've certainly earned it, lovely, long-suffering readers of mine. Truth be told, I have recently been lured from the fandom by... _le gasp! _original fiction! Rest assured, I've no intentions of abandoning projects, simply that now my time is alternately spread thinly between things I enjoy, things I enjoy and must do, and things I must do because I've been told to do them, and don't I know that broccoli is actually very good for me? **

**Ahem.**

**But anyway, original fiction is all proving rather fun and exciting at the moment. I've been lured in off the streets by a local writers' guild with biscuits and tea and pats on the head. Any day now, they'll drag me off to the vet to be micro-chipped. **

**Have a wonderful week duckies, and by all means share your thoughts in a review! Next chapter shouldn't be too far away, not if I keep coasting on a tidal-wave of squee.**

**Cheers.**

**Edit April 25, 2012: Thanks Sister-the-Elder for all of your corrections! I'm working my way through them. ;)**


	28. The Inattentive Teapot

**Goblin Knot**

**Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Inattentive Teapot**

Real life does not always read like a fairytale. The players can forget their lines, fall on stage, or, in a rapidly overwhelming panic attack, spend the entire opening night's performance clinging to the overhead flood-lights.

So it was that Sarah's misgivings did not melt away the moment Jareth's lips touched hers, but the longer the kiss lasted, the more it deepened, Sarah found she was more open to the idea of being convinced otherwise. Tangling her fingers through Jareth's wild blonde hair, she meshed herself closer against him, imagining she could taste traces of blood in his mouth, the raw iron of freshly-caught prey.

She couldn't help herself, she had to giggle. The whole situation was completely ridiculous. How could she be here, sharing this mind-shattering moment with such an impossible character as the Goblin King? Everything about him was fictitious; his hair, his eyes, his clothes- all the product of an author's calf-eyed daydream.

"Do I amuse you, love?" asked Jareth, subtly tilting his head to kiss her neck.

"I can't believe this," said Sarah, wondering if _Labyrinth's _author could have possibly known about Jareth's deft, wandering fingers, their unparalleled ability to unfasten buttons while their owner's mind is... preoccupied. "It's just too..."

"Enjoyable?" supplied Jareth, shrugging out of his shirt in one fluid, suspiciously rehearsed movement.

"Improbable," corrected Sarah, absorbed by the lean sinew sliding beneath Jareth's skin, by being crushed against the cold crescent amulet which lay beside his heart. She had to know. They had come this far. She had to find out, had to be brave.

"Why me?" she asked in a small voice, raising barely a whisper across Jareth's chest. "After everything, how can you want me... like _this_? I don't understand."

Jareth slid his hands up from her waist, mapping her curves. They came to rest on either side of her face, pushing away her knotted hair.

"You really don't know, do you?" said Jareth.

"Making feel like an idiot won't make my clothes fall off," said Sarah, scowling. "You're the one who wanted me to talk, so here I am."

"Here you are," agreed Jareth, kissing her eyelids, her temple.

"Talking," said Sarah, unsure of who she was trying to remind.

"Very prettily too, I might add," said Jareth bemusedly. "One day you'll make a very fine public speaker, especially to an audience of one."

"Don't do that," said Sarah.

"Do what?"

"Distract me," said Sarah in a panic, "it's... distracting!"

"Oh, but I like it when you're distracted," said Jareth. "Your skin's deliciously warm, and you turn the most delightful shade of pink. Keep doing that, and I may be inclined to say it's my favourite colour.

Sarah flushed crimson. "You're doing it again," she complained. Jareth smirked.

"Really? How clumsy of me. Come, this really isn't the type of conversation we ought to be having here, in a marvellously constructed death-trap." Faster than blinking, Jareth's hands grabbed at something hiding behind her ear, at something in one of her pockets. "Particularly with spectators," he revised, holding the tiny goblin children by the scruffs of their necks and dangling them in front of Sarah's face.

Sarah thought she was embarrassed before. Now, she was horrified. "What? Did they... all of that.. God, no."

One goblin batted its eyes at the other, "Ooo, Kingy, kiz _me_. Kizzy Kizzy, I so prissy."

The second goblin waved a dismissive hand. "Noes, you kiz _me_, I is most importpants." Both children made a noise to suggest that they were throwing up, loudly.

"That's enough," said Jareth, dropping them to the floor and shooing them to the door with the toe of his boot. Out of deference to Sarah's kind-hearted sensibilities, he did not kick them out of the hole in the wall, as was his preference. He wasn't going to risk sparking her temper again, not now, when the first time in millennia things were going so _well_. Punishment would come later, Jareth promised himself. He'd drop them into the rattling jar of live beetles in the kitchen first chance he had, after...

After...

Jareth's mind escaped him, for a moment. He could only turn back to Sarah, staring at her mutely as she rubbed her arms and looked about the maze self-consciously, her lovely, cruel eyes settling on his discarded shirt on the floor.

"Stop that," said Jareth.

Startled, Sarah glanced up. "What?"

"Distracting me," said Jareth, stepping over the shirt to stand beside her, leaning down to murmur in her ear, "I have it on good authority it is rather flummoxing for those on the receiving end."

Sarah's lips quirked, tapping one of her fingers against Jareth's amulet. "Flummoxing? Who on- no, pardon me, _under _earth uses a word like 'flummoxing'?" Unperturbed, Jareth reached out a hand for her, but was held at bay by that single, delicate finger. Even now, she possessed such strength of character, such power. Like then, she was still utterly aware of her own capabilities, of her incredible, inexplicable magnetism. But she was learning.

Jareth wasn't sure whether he should be feeling pleased or frightened.

"Would you prefer 'discombobulating'?" he said politely, as though he were dressed in all his royal finery for Court, and not comfortably half-naked, attempting to woo a lady who, up until this point, had rigorously defied wooing with the conventional thrown snakes and threats of being entombed alive in the Labyrinth.

"Unless your tongue can tap it out in Morse Code, I'd have to say no," said Sarah.

Jareth froze for the span of a single heartbeat. "Apologies. You lost me at 'tongue'," he said, attempting to accost her with his other hand- finding her frustratingly beyond his reach.

It was then Sarah smiled. Tentative at first, it grew into the sly, mocking curve she only wore Underground. The smile of a Champion who has solved all puzzles but one. The smile of a woman who is one move from winning the game. "My my, points off for inattentiveness," she said, taking a step backwards across the length of the landing. Jareth mirrored her stride, never allowing her fingertip to leave his amulet.

"Oh, that was uncalled for, love. Call me fool, craven, or even a blessed teapot, but never inattentive. There's not a single part of you that merits such treatment."

Arching an eyebrow, Sarah took another step backwards. "I take it I'm meant to find that flattering?"

Jareth closed the door to his chamber behind them, savouring Sarah's exquisite look of surprised shock, like two beautifully plumaged birds who have collided mid-air then fallen delicately into a wood-chipper. "How did...what...?" she said inarticulately.

"Dear me," Jareth chided, "not suffering from _inattentiveness_ are we?"

Sarah looked irritated. "You cheated!" she accused.

"Not so," said Jareth, walking into her pointed finger to lightly kiss her on the forehead. "I merely used magick to rearrange the castle. Entirely permissible for Fae. Expected, even "

"Could you always do that?" said Sarah, "Use magick to... jump around?"

"Only with you," said Jareth, allowing Sarah to pull his head down to her own height, so that she might gently lift the amulet's chain from his neck, and hang it about her own.

"Only _for_ you," said Jareth, letting her keep hold of his neck, feeling, knowing his skin was afire as she gifted him the first of her kisses, freely given, his one real wish.

"Oh Sarah, don't you remember? For you, I can make magick _dance_."

**a/n: _Magic Dance. _We knew it had to happen. Who can possibly resist its cheesy synth-pop charms? NO-ONE, that's who! **

**I hope you've all enjoyed this chapter. It was an interesting experience as I tend to nest in public spaces when writing. It made for shifty conversations such as,**

"**What are you doing?"**

"**What.. what do you mean, _what am I doing? _More to the point, what am I _not _doing?" Like the fearless frill-neck lizard, I then tore away across the grass to menace my enemies from the safety of a nearby tree.**

**I also must thank everyone for providing such voluminous, encouraging feedback. Words fail... other than that you're all amazing, like _Magic Dance _on infinite loop! :D**

**Cheers. **


End file.
